In August 1990, as Saddam Hussein's Republican Army led the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the United States grappled with a profound foreign policy dilemma: how to denounce a former ally without sounding hypocritical. The problem was compounded by an equally profound public relations dilemma: the truth would never be very persuasive in mobilizing national and international support in opposition to Iraq's aggressions.
The truth: that the United States' Middle Eastern foreign policy is inextricably tied to its domestic economic policy vis-a-vis maintaining a steady and low-cost supply of oil to the American industrial and consumer market.
The truth: a major percentage of U.S. oil consumption comes from foreign sources primarily located in the Middle East.
The truth: the concepts of "democracy" and "freedom" as understood by the American people and the industrialized democracies (Western Europe, the U. S., Canada and Japan, primarily) are not a part of the political dialogue in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia - the two countries invaded and threatened, respectively, by Saddam Hussein's armed forces.
Nevertheless, in this age of worldwide media coverage, the policymakers in the Administration of President George Bush attempted to level with the public in their first responses to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. They had little choice: with Saddam Hussein letting it be known that the Emir of Kuwait was an "undemocratic monarch" whose people Iraq intended to liberate, news media from the industrialized democracies did not hide the fact that, Iraqi propaganda rhetoric aside, the Emir had suspended Kuwait's parliament and ruled the country as a familial feudal state for the past half-decade. Saudi Arabia's ruling monarch, King Fahd of the Ibn Saud family, held an even more conservative rein over his country's affairs; there had never even been the hint of a parliamentary system allowed in the country. Rather, as the son of a man who ...