April Catherine Glaspie (born April 26, 1942) is an American former
diplomat and senior member of the
Foreign Service, best known for her role in the events leading up to the
Gulf War....
United States Ambassador to Iraq[edit]
Meetings with Saddam Hussein[
Glaspie's appointment as U.S. ambassador to Iraq followed a period from 1980 to 1989
[1] during which the United States had given covert support to Iraq during
its war with Iran.
Glaspie had her first meeting with Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein and his Deputy Prime Minister,
Tariq Aziz, on July 25, 1990. In her telegram from July 25, 1990, to the Department of State, Glaspie summarized the meeting as follows:
Saddam told the ambassador on July 25 that
Mubarak has arranged for Kuwaiti and Iraqi delegations to meet in
Riyadh, and then on July 28, 29 or 30, the Kuwaiti crown prince will come to Baghdad for serious negotiations. "Nothing serious will happen" before then, Saddam had promised Mubarak.
[2]
At least two transcripts of the meeting have been published. The
State Department has not confirmed the accuracy of these transcripts, but Glaspie's cable has been released at the
Bush Library and placed online by the
Margaret Thatcher Foundation.
One version of the transcript has Glaspie saying:
We can see that you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of your threats against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship — not confrontation — regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait's borders?
Later the transcript has Glaspie saying:
We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait.
Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.
Another version of the transcript (the one published in
The New York Times on 23 September 1990) has Glaspie saying:
But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 1960s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi (
Chedli Klibi, Secretary General of the
Arab League) or via
President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.
When these purported transcripts were made public, Glaspie was accused of having given tacit approval for the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which took place on August 2, 1990. It was argued that Glaspie's statements that "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts" and that "the Kuwait issue is not associated with America" were interpreted by Saddam as giving free rein to handle his disputes with Kuwait as he saw fit. It was also argued that Saddam would not have invaded Kuwait had he been given an explicit warning that such an invasion would be met with force by the United States.
[3][4] Journalist
Edward Mortimer wrote in the
New York Review of Books in November 1990:
It seems far more likely that Saddam Hussein went ahead with the invasion because he believed the US would not react with anything more than verbal condemnation. That was an inference he could well have drawn from his meeting with US Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, and from statements by State Department officials in Washington at the same time publicly disavowing any US security commitments to Kuwait, but also from the success of both the
Reagan and the
Bush administrations in heading off attempts by the US Senate to impose sanctions on Iraq for previous breaches of international law... continue ->
April Glaspie - Wikipedia
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