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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30743 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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"Save" might be a bit of an excessive claim, but circa 1991 the local balance of power certainly suggested that Iraq could have made attempts to annex all or part of other adjacent states. Before the Gulf War, Iraq had the world's fourth largest army and relatively modern equipment. That the war would end in a curbstomp in hours was not a foregone conclusion beforehand.

Qatar is a peninsula, Bahrein is an island. Speaking of those two realistically, they are only reachable from Iraq's direction through a seaborne invasion. Did the Iraqis ever have the capability to do that?

Iraq was getting the best of Iran just a few years earlier, but not by enough to prevent them from accepting a ceasefire with little permanent gain, and not by such a large margin that you'd think they were an existential threat to the whole region.

I can't blame anyone for treating them like an existential threat anyway. "Murderous dictator builds rapidly-expanding war machine and uses weak revanchist excuses to start salami-slicing his neighbors" was an uncomfortably familiar story, and "everybody just sits back and hopes that he'll be satisfied after a few slices and stop and reform" was no longer considered to be a safe way to bring it to a conclusion.

Sure, but if Kuwait didn’t have oil- and hadn’t been very firmly willing to play nice with the West about its sale- the reaction wouldn’t have been military intervention, it would’ve been an angsty op Ed in the NYT and a strongly worded letter submitted to the UN, which would then approve it.

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