The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [89]
On July 31 King Fahd personally chaired a meeting between representatives of Iraq and Kuwait to arbitrate the disputes between the two countries, which concerned the ownership of the invaluable oil fields on the border. Saddam also contended that Kuwait’s high rate of production was driving down the price of petroleum and ruining the Iraqi economy, already bankrupted by a disastrous war with Iran that Saddam had provoked in 1980, which ended eight years later after a million casualties. Despite the king’s mediation, talks between Iraq and Kuwait quickly fell apart. Two days later, the formidable Iraqi army rolled over the tiny nation, and suddenly all that stood between Saddam Hussein and the Saudi oil fields was a few miles of sand and the superbly equipped but cowed and undermanned Saudi military. One battalion of the Saudi National Guard—fewer than a thousand men—guarded the oil fields.
The royal family was so shocked that it forced the government-controlled media to wait a week before announcing the invasion. Moreover, after years of paying billions of dollars to cultivate the friendship of neighboring countries, the royal family was stunned to discover how isolated it was in the Arab world. The Palestinians, Sudanese, Algerians, Libyans, Tunisians, Yemenis, and even the Jordanians openly supported Saddam Hussein.
With the Iraqi army poised on the Saudi border, bin Laden wrote a letter to the king beseeching him not to call upon the Americans for protection; he followed this with a frenzied round of lobbying the senior princes. The royal family itself was divided about the best course of action, with Crown Prince Abdullah strongly opposing American assistance and Prince Naif seeing no obvious alternative.
The Americans had already made a decision, however. If, after snacking on Kuwait, Saddam gobbled up the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, he would then control the bulk of the world’s available oil supply. That was an intolerable threat to the security of the United States, not just the Kingdom. U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney flew to Jeddah with a team of advisors, including General Norman Schwarzkopf, to persuade the king to accept American troops to defend Saudi Arabia. Schwarzkopf showed satellite images of three armored Iraqi divisions inside Kuwait, followed by ground troops—far more manpower, he contended, than the number needed to occupy such a small country. The Saudis had intelligence that several Iraqi reconnaissance teams had already crossed the Saudi border.
Crown Prince Abdullah advised against letting the Americans enter the country for fear they would never depart. In the name of the president of the United States, Cheney pledged that the troops would leave as soon as the threat was over, or whenever the king said they should go. That promise decided the matter.
“Come with all you can bring,” the king implored. “Come as fast as you can.”
In early September, weeks after American forces began arriving, bin Laden spoke to Prince Sultan, the minister of defense, in the company of several Afghan mujahideen commanders and Saudi veterans of that conflict. It was a bizarre and grandiose replication of General Schwarzkopf’s briefing. Bin Laden brought his own maps of the region and presented a detailed plan of attack, with diagrams and charts, indicating trenches and sand traps along the border to be constructed with the Saudi Binladin Group’s extensive inventory of earthmoving equipment. Added to this, he would create a mujahideen army made up of his colleagues from the Afghan jihad and unemployed Saudi youth. “I am ready