Show transcript
Well, I've been watching a lot of Gulf War coverage from the early 1990s, 1990-1991, on YouTube, and for those of you who weren't around back then, August 2nd of 1990, Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, invaded Kuwait. There have been a lot of theories as to what prompted him to do that, but one of them is that our ambassador at the time, or one of the envoys that President George H.W. Bush sent, basically may have either indirectly or directly indicated that the United States would be okay with this move, which, because before this invasion happened, Iraq and the United States were on good terms. We actually supported Iraq in their war against Iran back in the 1980s, but they invaded Kuwait, and if you know anything about the Bush family, they're big into oil, and Saudi Arabia started going, yeah, they might be coming after us next, so they made a little phone call, look up a guy by the name of Prince Bandar, interesting story there, I may go into a future podcast about that one of these days, but he arranged the United States to militarily intervene in the situation. There was even talk, I was in college at the time, there was talk about bringing the draft back, and I was not even 20 years old at the time, I was basically in the draft age, I was 19 years old at the time, and there were a lot of us in college going, are we going to get drafted? For those of you who don't know, the draft ended in 1973, and hasn't been brought back since, for good reason. So if the United States were to attack, they'd do it with an all-volunteer army. Now for those of you who may not know, yeah, we did eventually build up over the course of several months in Saudi Arabia, and thanks to General Schwarzkopf, who led the coalition forces, we pretty much routed the Iraqis. It was a mismatch. Now, there are a lot of people who wonder why we went to war over such a small country. Oil. It's oil. If Iraq took Kuwait and basically we didn't do anything about it, who's to say they wouldn't have gone out to Saudi Arabia? It's kind of like a domino theory. If Saddam Hussein gets Kuwait, we go, okay, no biggie, then who's to say we wouldn't go out to Saudi Arabia? That would have been a much bigger piece, because if you just look at geography, Saudi Arabia is much bigger than Kuwait, and they have a much bigger military. It would have been a big fight, but possibly a winnable one, unless the United States militarily intervened. Saudi Arabia knew this was a possibility, that's why we went in there. Was it right? I don't know. It's been 35 years, and the judgment, in my opinion, the jury, I should say, is still out on that. At the time, I supported it, because I thought it was realistic, hey, this is going to cause gas prices to go up. If we let him get away with this, they're going to stay up big time. We see now that any time there's military action in the Gulf, gas prices shoot through the roof, as we're seeing with Iran right now. I may go into my thoughts about this whole situation, and why battling Iran for this is really, really, really stupid. Really stupid. That's it for now. Thanks.
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