Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hosting an important guest at his palace in Baghdad on Wednesday, July 25, 1990. Accompanied by his close advisers, the official Saddam was hosting was April Catherine Glaspie, then-U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad. Glaspie, the first female ambassador appointed by the U.S. State Department to an Arab capital, had never met Saddam personally until the appointment in Iraq when she arrived in 1988. Glaspie, who served as a diplomat in Kuwait, Syria, and Egypt before Iraq, was one of the most experienced actors of the American State Department in the Middle East at that time. The fact that Saddam finally wanted to see Glaspie about 1.5 years after he set foot in the capital was to understand how the ongoing tension with Kuwait was perceived by Washington.
During the meeting, Saddam Hussein told Ambassador Glaspie that they had suffered a great loss as a result of the policies implemented by Kuwait and some Arab countries. had stated: "I promised Mubarak that I would not take any steps until this meeting with the Kuwaitis," Saddam closed the meeting with the sentence, "Send my warm regards to President George Bush." Ambassador Glaspie, in her reply, told him that he had served in various Arab countries and said, "We are not, and never have been, a party to the issues between Arabs."
Saddam Hussein carefully noted these sentences. Ambassador Glaspie's words, the day before - on July 24 - U.S. Secretary of State Margaret D. Tutwiler, "Does the United States have a say in defending Kuwait?" It was similar to his answer to the question: “We do not have any defense agreements with Kuwait. Nor do we have any specific defense or security promises to Kuwait.” The same statements were to be repeated by the American Deputy Secretary of State, John Kelly, on July 31: “The United States has no guarantee or intention to defend Kuwait!”
After this clear green light, it was not surprising that Saddam Hussein ordered the Iraqi army to invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990. What was surprising for Saddam was that the United States - contrary to previous words and assertive statements - went on the battlefield with all its might to defend Kuwait and followed it with the Arab world led by Saudi Arabia. Although the regime in Baghdad was difficult to accept, the Washington administration had trapped Saddam.
From 1990 to the 2003 invasion, the innocent and oppressed Iraqi people bore the brunt of the U.S. front's hostility to Saddam Hussein. Brutal embargoes have restricted ordinary people's access to the most basic of necessities, leaving hundreds of thousands of children without medicine and treatment. The so-called target was the regime, but the Baath cadres had already secured themselves. For decades, the Iraqi people were once again oppressed in the international conflict.
The sharpest result of the invasion of Iraq, which was carried out under the pretext of the 9/11 attacks, was the filling of the vacuum left by the overthrown Saddam Hussein regime by Iran. The U.S. has allowed Iran and its allied forces to handle the positions that it deliberately left open in many fields. Thus, the cooperation that started during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 continued in Iraq as well. The destruction of the Sunni fabric in Iraq with anger towards Saddam would of course also benefit the United States. The aforementioned cooperation would be staged in Syria this time after 2011, and it would be ensured that Daesh-type organizations were exposed and the entire Sunni world would be declared "radical" and "terrorist" in their eyes. When you look carefully at the Western press today, you will see that the "jihadist"-type labels are only affixed to Sunnis and that the Shiite terrorist organizations that engage in massacres on the ground with purely sectarian motives are protected by a shield of silence.
Perhaps the only point that was not calculated in the design of post-Saddam Iraq was the resistance of Iraqi-Arab Shiism to Persian Shiism imposed by Iran. The name Muqtada al-Sadr is especially important in this competition, which has now emerged on the scene in all its dimensions. It is not possible to make sense of the chaos in Iraq today without mentioning the position and position of the al-Sadr family, of which he is a member, in the Shiite world.
In Saturday's column, let's talk about some of the important members of the al-Sadr family in the Shiite world.
