In ’91, Hussein Sought Soviet Help to Head Off U.S.

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

WASHINGTON — As the American-led ground offensive in the first war with Iraq got under way on Feb. 24, 1991, Saddam Hussein directed his frustration at an unlikely target: the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Mr. Hussein had dispatched his foreign minister to Moscow in an 11th-hour bid to head off a ground war.

After prodding by Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Hussein had offered to withdraw Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 21 days. But the United States appeared to be moving ahead with its land campaign.

(snip)

The disclosures about Mr. Hussein’s closed-door deliberations that first day of the Persian Gulf land war are documented in an extraordinary Iraqi archive, which includes 2,600 hours of recorded meetings and millions of pages of documents, that was captured by United States forces after the 2003 invasion.

On the 20th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm (the air campaign began on Jan. 17, 1991), three transcripts of Mr. Hussein’s fateful decisions are being released to coincide with a symposium in Texas on Thursday with Mr. Bush and members of his war cabinet. Only a small portion of the archive, stored in digital form at the National Defense University, has been declassified and opened to outside researchers. (A 2008 government report drew on the three Feb. 24 transcripts, but until now they have not been available in their entirety.)

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/world/middleeast/20archive.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

[Arctic Dave]

1. Interesting use of the word "captured".

I would assume they were stolen given the circumstances.

[AnnieBW]

2. I remember that

Gorby basically told Saddam to go pound sand.

[JackRiddler]

3. Why is only "a small portion" of the archive declassified and open to researchers?

This was 20 years ago and the current president is the third one after the departure of Bush Sr.!

Secrecy rules the land, and we pretend to even know our own history.

[Posteritatis]

7. 25 years is the cutoff date

There's exceptions usually totaling about ten percent of all classified documents, but at the moment (as of last January) the rule is that they're automatically declassified 25 years from the date of creation. In practice things usually come out in big blobs of documents several times a year as a set of papers is accessioned into the archives. Prior to that there's other ways to get documents out - something can simply be manually declassified, or a successful intra-government or FOIA challenge will do it too.

Bush tried an executive order right around the time of the Iraq invasion to put a freeze on declassification for an indeterminate period for a lot of documents, and adding several years to a lot of others, but that's one hell of an aberration from the standards of the last few decades, and that was overturned after his presidency. 25 years, or 25-ish years, has been the general rule for declassifying documents since the early 1970s.

Basically, 2016 is going to be ... interesting with regards to what happened in the Gulf War.

[JackRiddler]

11. Which is neither a divine nor a constitutional nor a particularly democratic rule.

As far as I'm concerned, the minute an administration's done everything should be presumed declassifiable. This is just more guaranteeing that no one will ever be held accountable for criminal behavior and the only Americans who ever know their history will be a small minority who have a clue what was happening 25 years before and the interest and energy to explore it.

[Lurks Often]

4. It was widely known back then that Saddam

went to the Soviets when he finally realized that the US and the surrounding Arab countries were serious.

[David__77]

5. Help that should have been offerred.

Not in terms of active intervention, but there were other ways.

[No Elephants]

9. What makes you thnk it wasn't offered. I read the OP as a deal haviing

been brokered, which the U.S. chose to reject or ignore--after having told Saddam, via April Glaspie, that the U.S. had no interest in his little border disputes with Kuwait.

A sorry mess, any way you look at it.

[UpInArms]

6. Mr. Bush and members of his war cabinet

[No Elephants]

8. Why give someone 21 days to withdraw troops from a foreign nation when you have missles?

And men and women willing to risk life, limb and sanity?

[Doctor_J]

10. and dignity and morality