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Notes -
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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