Bin Laden, Saddam and the law of unintended consequences
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and turned the country into Iraq's "19th province". Osama bin Laden, then a popular figure in Saudi Arabia because of his exploits fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, knew exactly how to respond.
He proposed to recall his old comrades and form a new army of Mujahideen fighters to liberate Kuwait from Saddam's grasp. Bin laden "had worked out a step-by-step strategy to cross the Saudi border and infiltrate Kuwait, then wage an urban guerrilla campaign, fighting from house to house until the Iraqis were expelled," writes Robert Lacey in "Inside the Kingdom", his gripping book about Saudi Arabia.
Bin Laden actually presented this plan to Prince Ahmad bin Abdulaziz, then deputy interior minister. But the kingdom's rulers turned down this risky and impractical scheme. Instead, they allowed 700,000 American and allied troops to enter Saudi Arabia and turn the country into a giant launch pad for Operation Desert Storm, which successfully liberated Kuwait in January 1991.
Bin Laden furiously denounced the presence of Western forces in the Arabian peninsula. The Saudi authorities responded by stripping him of his citizenship and confiscating his passport. Bin Laden chose to go into exile, first in Afghanistan for about six months and then in Sudan from 1992. We know the rest of the story.
I mention this only because it provides an interesting example of the law of unintended consequences. Without Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and the Western response, bin Laden would probably have lived out his days as a minor scion of the Saudi establishment, feted for his role in Afghanistan.
In retrospect, we can now see that 9/11 and the transformation of al-Qaeda into a terrorist group hell-bent on striking the West had its origins in the events of 1990-91. None of the key decision-makers of that era – from Saddam Hussein to George Bush Senior, Margaret Thatcher and King Fahd – could have foreseen the consequences of their actions.
One man, however, did have an inkling of what was likely to happen. King Hussein of Jordan declined to condemn Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and tried to broker a peaceful solution. In private, he voiced his fear that the alternative to diplomacy – deploying a Western armada in Saudi Arabia – would trigger a radical Islamist backlash that would last for decades and be impossible to contain. With the perspective of 23 years, King Hussein's warning looks prophetic.
But let's not delude ourselves: the consequences of following his advice might well have been still more disastrous. It's almost impossible to believe that Saddam would have left Kuwait without a war. If we had tolerated his obliteration of a member state of the United Nations, he would almost certainly have proceeded to invade another neighbour, probably Saudi Arabia, and the result would have been an even bigger and more dangerous war. Even if King Hussein had somehow succeeded in persuading Saddam to leave Kuwait peacefully, the Iraq of 1990 was only a few years away from developing a nuclear weapon. The dangers of Saddam with a Bomb do not bear thinking about.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to see a viable alternative to expelling Iraq from Kuwait by force. But the late King Hussein, who died in 1999, was the one and only leader who foresaw what would follow.
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