Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [508]
In making these two points I felt that experience as well as instinct enabled me to trust my judgement. There was, of course, the enormously valuable experience of having been Prime Minister through the Falklands War. My visits to the Gulf had also allowed me to establish bonds of trust with the rulers of many of these states, who often had closer links with Britain than with America. I understood their problems and could gauge their reactions.
President Bush listened to what I had to say. He then told me that he had been speaking to President Mubarak and King Hussein. The message he had received was that the United States should stay calm and give an Arab solution a chance. He had said that that was fine but that it must involve Iraqi withdrawal and the restoration of the lawful Government of Kuwait. He had meanwhile authorized a boycott of Iraqi goods, termination of credits and the freezing of Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets. He had also instructed ships of the American fleet to move north from the Indian Ocean into the Gulf, although they were currently being hampered by heavy seas.
We then got down to discussing what must be done next. I said that if Saddam Hussein did not withdraw, the Security Council would need to impose a full trade embargo. That, however, would only be effective if everybody implemented it. It would be necessary to close down the pipelines across both Turkey and Saudi Arabia through which Iraq exported the greater part of its oil. Those would not be easy decisions. Saudi Arabia, especially, might fear that Iraq would use such action as an excuse to attack her. We could send troops to protect Saudi Arabia; but only at the specific request of the king. (In fact, a few days later the US Defence Secretary, Dick Cheney, flew to Saudi Arabia to talk to the king about precisely this.)
At this point President Bush was told that the President of Yemen wanted to speak to him on the telephone. Before the President left to take the call, I reminded him that Yemen, a temporary member of the Security Council, had not voted on the resolution demanding the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It turned out that the President of Yemen too wanted time to come up with an Arab solution. President Bush told him that such a ‘solution’ must involve the withdrawal of Iraqi forces and return of the proper Government of Kuwait if it was to be accepted. The President of Yemen then apparently compared what had happened in Kuwait to US intervention in Grenada at which George Bush rightly bridled. When he returned President Bush and I agreed that all this did not seem very encouraging. We then went out to give a press conference. The President was asked if he ruled out the use of force. He replied that he did not — a statement the press took to be a strengthening of his position against Saddam Hussein. But I had never found any weakness in it from the first.
By now I was receiving a flood of telegrams reporting on reactions to the invasion. The Cabinet Office assessment of Iraq’s plans noted that an attack against Saudi Arabia did not seem imminent, because it would probably take a week to assemble the required forces. To my mind this reinforced rather than diminished the need for immediate tough action.
Understandably, I now had only half my mind on the programme of events which had been arranged for me. That said, I was fascinated by what I saw. Friday was a day of presentations and discussions about science, environment and defence — punctuated by news about what was happening in the crisis which now gripped the international community. I was talking to the young scientists working at the SDI National Test Facility at Falcon when I was called away to speak to President