Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [37]
Working in close coordination with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, my father flew to Baghdad on August 3 to meet with Saddam Hussein. After heated discussions, he managed to persuade Saddam to attend a mini Arab summit in Jeddah on August 5 to solve the crisis within an Arab context. Saddam agreed to withdraw his troops from Kuwait on the condition that the Arab League did not condemn Iraq. He actually announced that Iraq would begin to pull back its troops from Kuwait on August 5. My father believed that he was about to succeed in brokering an Arab solution to the crisis within the forty-eight hours he had requested in his consultations with King Fahd and President Mubarak. But the Arab League rejected this proposal. That evening, the League passed a resolution condemning Iraq’s aggression and calling for an unconditional withdrawal. My father’s attempts at diplomacy collapsed.
While the Arabs were negotiating, U.S. rhetoric became increasingly belligerent. My father was troubled by the risk of internationalizing the crisis and by the senseless loss of life and destruction a new war would bring. He worried about the destabilizing impact of an invasion of a major Arab country by America and her allies, and of basing Western troops in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf. He foresaw that this would set in motion an unstoppable chain of events, leading to retaliation by radical groups and further wars in our region.
A few days after meeting with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, my father traveled to the United States to speak to President George H. W. Bush at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine. He firmly believed that the standoff could be resolved without war. “We can get Iraq out of Kuwait without violence,” he said. He tried to explain the risks of a war in the Middle East, and detailed in sharp terms the destruction and misery it would cause, but President Bush would not listen. “I went to Kennebunkport as a friend!” my father would say in exasperation. “I told the president, I’ve got a commitment from Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait!” But the president had already made up his mind.
I was fiercely opposed to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but like my father I did not support a retaliatory war by the United States. My father had been placed in an impossible position and paid a heavy price for trying to arrange a peaceful withdrawal by Iraq from Kuwait. He felt his mediation efforts were willfully misinterpreted by the West, as he was accused of aligning himself with Saddam’s camp. The attitudes of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and President Bush were, to his mind, too black-and-white; there was no middle way. Most of his friends, including many in the Middle East, turned on him. One person who remained supportive was Prince Charles of Great Britain, who, standing out among all others, seemed to grasp that my father’s efforts to slow down the rush to war was not a sign that he was backing Saddam.
In November, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 678 demanding Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait by January 15, 1991. My father asked me in December to join him on a mission to Baghdad. This would be his third and last visit during the crisis. He had arranged to go with Yasser Arafat and the vice president of Yemen, Ali Salem al-Beidh, in an effort to negotiate the release of the Western hostages. We flew the five hundred miles from Amman to Baghdad on my father’s plane in well under two hours, less time than it takes to fly from Washington, D.C., to Boston. Although Baghdad is close