Goldfinger is Still Alive and Well - 21 June 2002

On a hot desert day at the end of July 12 years ago the American ambassador to Iraq was summoned to the presence of the head of state - the dictator Saddam Hussein.

She had no idea what the summons was about though there was a wide range of Arab versus Arab controversies he might choose from.

It was such a topic, indeed to Saddam Hussein, the most chronically disturbing Arab issue for the past 30 years.

For just so long Kuwait, a small country at the head of the Persian Gulf, had been set free and independent from its long-time British protector.

And during that time Kuwait had developed its oil fields and become immensely rich.

Saddam Hussein claimed that Kuwait was part of Iraq.

To have and to hold it would put him on the way to achieving something that the Soviets had yearned for right after the Second War and been denied by the intervention of the United Nations, which was to be sovereign of the Gulf - and so, as Churchill foresaw and warned about, soon to be able to conquer Europe without a war by possessing 60% of the oil Western Europe lived by and so be able to dictate to countries like Britain, France, Germany, that they should abandon their precious democratic ways and get themselves governments friendly to Iraq.

After 30 years of argument and paper agreements - what we now call negotiations - Kuwait in the summer of 1990 was still independent and still very rich.

Saddam Hussein wanted to annex it, though his word for annexation was to arrange a mutually agreeable settlement of a border dispute.

When Ambassador April Glaspie arrived, Saddam asked her what was the United States policy or opinion concerning Kuwait.

She told him her country had no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, "like your border disagreement with Kuwait", but the United States would never accept a settlement achieved by other than peaceful means.

That was all there was to the interview. Washington checked with other Arab leaders who agreed with the White House that Saddam was almost certainly trying to get his way by blackmail and other forms of pressure on Kuwait.

A check with British intelligence - always the most knowledgeable about Middle Eastern affairs - received the response that Saddam was undoubtedly bluffing.

Well nobody had long to wait to see that they'd all been dead wrong and poor Ambassador Glaspie was taunted for a time with the charge that she had more or less given Saddam the cue, the high sign, to do whatever he wanted.

The United Nations Security Council condemned Saddam for an act of aggression.

Saddam - well aware that the Council's condemnation was normally as far as it would go with any act of aggression - immediately invaded and annexed Kuwait and began at once to plunder its wealth. Kuwait City was by then the banking capital of the Arab world.

During the next four days the White House's diplomatic lasso was thrown out to London, Cairo, Turkey, Jordan, even to Yasser Arafat.

President Bush - the first that is - called a dawn meeting of the National Security Council at which the likely commander of any military action, one General Schwarzkopf, expressed the general feeling that the United States might fight for Saudi Arabia but hardly for Kuwait.

President Bush told the press there was no thought of American intervention. The United Nations anyway had voted to impose a total embargo on Iraq.

Two days after the invasion President Bush took a half day out to keep a promise to the British prime minister who was addressing a conference in Aspen, Colorado, a resort town in the Rockies.

He found Mrs Thatcher in finer fighting fettle than all but one of his own advisers. She stressed that fighting for Kuwait now might be a necessary step to saving Saudi Arabia from invasion later on.

But two days after Saddam's invasion the United States had no more idea of going to war with Saddam than the United Kingdom had of fighting Germany three days before it declared war in August 1914.

What so swiftly transformed the views and policy of the United States and the onlooking allies-to-be was the recognition, first pressed on President Bush by Mrs Thatcher and then rather late in the day realised by the King of Saudi Arabia, that once he held Kuwait there was nothing to stop Saddam from seizing the Saudi oil fields. The King then asked for help.

Well what followed was, as we all know, the second Gulf War, what is often forgotten is that it was a United Nations war with 29 member nations taking part, though commanded inevitably by the one superpower.

The land campaign lasted only a hundred hours but in the last hours Saddam scorched the earth of Kuwait and did enormous damage to its economy by firing its oil fields.

The remnants of the Iraqi armies - abandoning their equipment, including hundreds of tanks - were chased north so helplessly that General Schwarzkopf reported home his forces could not, ought not to perform what was becoming a massacre.

So President Bush declared the war at an end.

The UN mission had been achieved - Kuwait was liberated.

The defeated generals met General Schwarzkopf and a treaty of surrender was signed with stern conditions stated and agreed to.

During the campaign there were rumours, backed by intelligence, that Saddam Hussein had the site, the materials and the skills required to build a nuclear weapon.

However, what came to be the most anxious and most flouted condition of the peace treaty was Saddam's promise to allow United Nations inspectors to go into Iraq and examine all locations suspected of making nuclear or chemical weapons.

No need, I'm afraid, to report that for 10 years Saddam and Saddam alone decided where the UN should go and what it should see.

Radar penetration cameras had shown many underground sites clearly equipped with the labs for making lethal tools. Saddam simply turned the UN men away year after year.

After the war was over there were rebel tribes - the Shiites and the Kurds especially - who felt betrayed by the allied forces' having stopped short of taking Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam. But that was no part of the UN's mission.

The Kurds famously rebelled and to the horror of the Western world, or to that part of it still concerned with Saddam, we learned that not only had Saddam reinvented his army but that he'd put down the Kurds in the most brutal way.

The president has spent many days since 11 September with every sort of military intelligence and biochemical expert on what to do about Saddam Hussein.

American and allied intelligence about his growing nuclear and biochemical capability is what decided the president and his closest advisers that after a continuing 10-year diplomatic defeat for the United Nations this administration could not, like the last one, simply ignore Saddam for the time being.

A week ago the president told a graduating class at West Point - America's top military academy: "If we wait for threats to fully materialise we will have waited too long."

So if there is a Bush policy its name is pre-emptive. Now the question is by what means?

The Pentagon has told him privately that if the answer is military it would take at least 200,000 troops, but considering the stress and strain of the campaign in Afghanistan - along with the reminder that it's not yet over - the United States would require, say, six months to have those troops ready.

But a military conflict is the last - even if still pre-emptive - resort. There's a lot of thought going into gauging the extent and potential power of opposition groups in Iraq.

Mr Bush has consulted most of the Arab leaders and need I say most say amen to Egypt's Mubarak: "Saddam must comply with UN inspection."

Wherefore this must? Who is going to make him ever? There is no answer.

In the meantime many Democrats in both houses of Congress, like many European governments, are wishing the president would cease to be obsessed with Saddam and let the whole thing just blow over.

But meanwhile too the president keeps reminding us that al-Qaeda agents, the thousands of them carefully scattered around the world, are also busy buying or trying to manufacture chemical weapons.

The other night we happened to come on a re-showing of the most memorable of the James Bond films, Goldfinger.

Goldfinger remember was the lumbering madman who used an invisible gas which his small fleet of aeroplanes used to spray on and instantly immobilise the entire military guard of Fort Knox - the United States' central depository of its gold bullion.

The movie still has all the old tension but also a quite new strain of present dread.

Goldfinger is still alive and well. Alas, James Bond is dead.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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