Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait POWER POLITICS IN A WORLD OF FLOWS Introduct

In addition, the Iraqi invasion had a further economic motive: "Saddam Hussein, by invading and holding Kuwait's territories, also hoped to gain and keep its electronically accumulated wealth" (Luke, 1991, p. 324). This financial wealth, the accumulated profits of Kuwait's oil sales, was by 1990 very large, estimated to have a net value of some $100 billion. Indeed, as Timothy Luke points out in "The Discipline of Security Studies and the Codes of Containment: Learning from Kuwait" (1991), in the course of the 1970s and 1980s the income derived from Kuwait's financial portfolio was actually larger than its income from oil sales. Kuwait's underlying oil income was larger than it could either consume or invest in its domestic economy, and it had in effect invested the balance to buy a piece of the global economy.

This financial treasure trove, were Saddam Hussein able to lay hand

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the modern state system. A familiar example is the British East India Company, which conquered India essentially on its own initiative, only very loosely bound by the authority of the British State. (Viewed through a different lens, the role of the British East India Company might be seen as prefiguring the possible future role of multinational corporations as power-political actors in their own right.) In medieval as in modern times a distinction must be drawn between legal theory and actual practice. The principalities and cities that made up the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed a status that arose initially out of the military weakness of the emperors, and evolved only gradually into effective legal sovereignty. Likewise, the late-medieval duchy of Burgundy enjoyed what we would now call Great Power status because it had the military means of assertion, notwithstanding theoretical subordination to its actual rival, the French crown. The tension between theory and practice inherent in these cases might be compared to French neo-imperialism in francophone Africa in recent decades, or to earlier American neo-imperialism in the Caribbean; in each case theoretically sovereign states were in fact subject to more or less routine i
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Gulf Kosovo, Silicon Valley, Saddam Hussein, Hong Kong, United Lebanon, Roman Empire, Unfortunately Saddam, Hedley Bull, Southeast Asian, Washington Conference, silicon valley, hong kong, power politics, financial wealth, flow-based world, military force, oil reserves, naval warfare, golden goose, modern times, holy roman empire, kuwait's oil reserves, soft conquest singapore, flow-based world economy, silicon valley counterparts,
Approximate Word count = 10254
Approximate Pages = 41 (250 words per page)