The target: an independent Europe and Japan

State Henry Kissinger. He noted that Kissinger, then Akins’ superior, had opposed Akins’ adamant attacks on such ideas.

Henry Kissinger, then U.S. Secretary, had another view, and my career in the Foreign Service did not extend much beyond that point … There are those in the Bush Administration who will point out that conditions are more propitious now than in 1975 …

Notably, in 1990, the former Kissinger Associate president, Lawrence Eagleburger, was deputy secretary of state under James Baker, and former Kissinger employee Brent Scowcroft was Bush’s White House national security adviser during this period, ensuring that the Kissinger view was dominant in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy during the Gulf War buildup. Furthermore, Kissinger was calling in the media for war against Iraq during this period. The domestic voices of opposition were effectively drowned out by the president’s war mobilization in the media.

THE TARGET: AN INDEPENDENT EUROPE AND JAPAN

Within a brief period, it became clear to thinking people in Europe and elsewhere that George Bush, indeed, had quite another objective than merely defending U.S. or even Western oil interests in Saudi Arabia. Bush’s incredibly vulgar public pronouncements, taunting Saddam Hussein, and comparing Iraq’s president to ‘a modern-day Adolf Hitler,’ were made quite deliberately.

An unprecedented Washington and London propaganda and pressure offensive was unleashed against Iraq’s Western supporters during the war and its six-month-long buildup, but not against the Soviet Union or France, which had been the major suppliers of Iraq’s armaments. The target was Germany—more precisely, German high-technology industry, which was vital for the reconstruction of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. France and the USSR, which together with China, the United States and Britain, comprised the fi ve permanent members of the UN Security Council, had agreed to vote with Washington and Britain for going to war after the ultimatum deadline of January 17. Their role in Iraq was discreetly ignored by various Washington-linked exposés.

Instead, through channels directly linked to British and American intelligence, Hamburg’s Der Spiegel and influential Republican senators such as Jesse Helms began an all-out offensive against

Germany, alleging that German exports of what were dubbed ‘dual use’ technologies had enabled Saddam’s military to fi re Soviet Scud missiles on Israeli targets.

A stunned Bonn government, itself in the midst of the complexities of dealing with reunifi cation of the former East Germany, was forced to divert precious time, attention and fi nancial resources from that pressing task, to focus on George Bush’s and Thatcher’s New World Order. In late January, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker went on one of the most high-pressure fi nancial fund-raising missions in history, extracting pledges from Germany, Japan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to guarantee a total of $54.5 billion to pay the costs of what was called Operation Desert Storm.

In one of many tragic footnotes to the history of the war, the London Times reported on February 6, some three weeks into the Operation Desert Storm bombings of Iraq, that the ‘Berlin–Baghdad railway, once a thriving network has been devastated in the Gulf war. The relentless allied bombing of Iraqi bridges, junctions and marshalling yards leaves in ruins one of the few extensive railway networks in the Middle East,’ they noted, adding, with understatement, ‘The old Berlin–Baghdad railway was a focus of strategic rivalry between Britain and Germany.’

After the conclusion of fi ghting, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, Lawrence J. Korb, revealed in an early April press conference in Washington that the U.S. government deliberately hid the actual Gulf War costs in order to offset domestic budget cuts, by using allied contributions in an ‘off-budget’ fund. Informed estimates were that the United States had come out of the entire Gulf War affair with a net ‘profi t’ of perhaps $19 billion, when all allied war contributions were counted. The huge infl ows of foreign money during the fi rst months of 1991, with fully $6.6 billion paid in cash by Germany, created a strong upward pressure on the U.S. dollar, which only weeks before had fallen to an all-time postwar low of 1.46 Deutschmarks. Moreover, aggressive U.S. arms contracts with Mideastern countries began to be signed before the war had ended, much to the anger of European arms makers.

The Bush administration triumphantly proclaimed that America had proved itself the strongest power in the world. His boast rang hollow to those at home standing in ever longer unemployment lines, or those in eastern Europe denied the prospect of needed billions of Western capital to rebuild infrastructure and modernize their economies.

Eastern European economies were devastated by the combined impact of Operation Desert Storm and the initial huge run-up in world oil prices during late 1990 to more than $30 per barrel, caused by the disruption of agreed oil deliveries from Iraq. Formerly, before January 1991, the countries of eastern Europe, through their trade ties with the Soviet Union, paid for their needed oil imports in a form of barter trade of industrial and agricultural goods with Moscow. After January 1, that system came to an end and Western dollars were needed to buy Russian oil. Iraq had over $1 billion in oil commitments to Bulgaria, Hungary and other countries of the east, which became unpayable as a result of the Gulf War.

In March 1990, the Italian magazine 30 Days interviewed an Italian professor with ties to Washington, Gianfranco Miglio. Miglio told the journal:

The U.S. saw that to avoid falling into a decline similar to that of the Soviet Union, it had to keep pace with potential adversaries of the future. They include Japan and the Continent of Europe united around German economic power … The United States could not accept the idea of Europe as it is today, a Continent that not only can manage quite happily without America, but one which is economically and technologically more powerful.

For this reason, Miglio declared, ‘The Americans turned their attention on the Middle East, on gaining control of the Arab oil tap on which Japan and Germany depend.’

From France, Charles de Gaulle’s former minister of agriculture, Edgar Pisani, head of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, told a German interviewer in Die Tageszeitung on February 18, at the height of the bombing of Iraq by U.S., British and French planes:

I wish it were not so. I am deeply shocked over the fact, that a nation is powerful only because it has the weapons. The USA, which in its economic affairs has extreme diffi culties, has managed to silence Japan and Europe, because they are militarily weak. How long will the World accept that various countries must pay one Gendarme to enforce their own World Order. Japan, Germany and the oil-rich states fi nance this Gendarme …

In a clear if veiled reference to the tragic follies of the British-led balance-of-power politics, German President Richard von Weizsäcker

told the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel shortly after the Gulf War, ‘We have earlier had the policy of balance of power of European nations, which ended in the perversion of National Socialism and resulted in two world wars. Then came the time of dominance by the two Superpowers.’ Von Weizsäcker made an appeal for Europe to take advantage of the unique chance fi nally to end such balance-of-power follies, through realizing the ‘unfulfi lled vision of de Gaulle, for a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.’

Operation Desert Storm and the Bush–Thatcher Gulf War did incomprehensible damage to Iraq and its people, to Kuwait and to the world economy, but there were signs that it had not accomplished its prime objective of reinserting Continental Europe into George Bush’s and Margaret Thatcher’s New World Order.