The stories of rape, torture and murder coming out of Kuwait read like an anthology of Iraqi insanity. But there was a logic at work: Iraq's occupation forces intended to erase the conquered nation's identity, and they meant to do it fast. Blotting out the word "Kuwait" on road signs was one tactic; ripping off the fingernails of people displaying the emir's picture was another. At one point the Iraqis brought a new mother before captured Kuwaiti resistance fighters and stripped her naked. "Here is the milk of Kuwait," they taunted. "Drink it." Eventually the Iraqis dumped the woman back home, alive. It was enough to humiliate the essence of the Kuwaiti spirit.

A bullet through the mouth or the back of the head was in some cases the kindest Iraqi punishment. The bodies regularly unloaded at Kuwait City's four major medical centers included victims with ax wounds, holes drilled through their kneecaps or intestines inflated with air. At Mubarak Hospital, the country's largest, doctors received victims burned by acid, with ears cut off and eyes gouged out. Torturers beat one woman, shot her three times in the chest and neatly sawed off her skull, exposing her brain. A gynecologist at the hospital, accused of poisoning Iraqi soldiers, had his fingernails torn out and his body burned with cigarettes before death. "They are psychopaths," Kalid Shalawi, acting chief of the hospital's medical section, told The Washington Post. Allied legal teams began the difficult job of compiling the full record from families who had tried to stay out of sight. "It was hell, it was horrible," said Seham al-Mutwaa, nursing director at Mubarak. "We were like rats in a trap, hiding while they stole and killed and raped."

The Iraqi terror was selective to some extent. The elite Republican Guard who spearheaded the invasion behaved with professional soldiers' discipline. Torture centers sprang up under the control of 7,000 agents of Iraq's Mukhabarat ("information gatherers"), who saved their most severe methods for resistance suspects. The worst brutality came early in the occupation. The Iraqis killed so many young men, Kuwaiti Maj. Abdulrahman Hadhood told the Post, that bodies were taken to a skating rink for short-term preservation. As the Iraqis sensed the war turning against them, they seemed to become more cautious. "They wouldn't come into the houses anymore," said Mrs. Suad al-Musallam in Kuwait City. "We could already see defeat in their eyes." Then in the final week the Iraqis abducted Kuwaiti hostages--5,000 by most preliminary estimates--possibly to use as bargaining chips in negotiations with the allies.

Random violence was not the absolute rule. Kuwaiti doctors, for example, denied rumors that in the first weeks of occupation the Iraqis took premature babies out of incubators and left them to die. Nonetheless, poorly trained Iraqi conscripts and volunteers of the People's Army militia often behaved without restraint. Their treatment of women was particularly outrageous under Islamic law. Even in Beirut, guerrilla street fighters rarely targeted women. But in Kuwait, Iraqi soldiers raped at will. Their victims included Filipino housemaids as well as Kuwaiti women. Samia al-Husallam, a medical student, said she was dumping her garbage when she discovered the nude body of a young Kuwaiti woman stuffed in a basket--apparently the victim of a gang rape.

The occupiers looted Kuwait as a matter of policy, reasoning that the wealth of the 19th province was needed elsewhere in greater Iraq. At least one Kuwaiti hotel served as a depot for troops foraging through homes. The Iraqis "would sleep during the day and work at night ," said a Filipino who worked at the Sheraton. "They were nice to us, and said if they didn't steal these things they would be shot." Army trucks carted away printing presses, street lamps, college libraries and museum artifacts. "It brings us back 400 or 500 years," said Suleiman al-Shaheen, a Kuwaiti foreign-affairs official. "Back to when tribes pillaged each other because one had more than the other."

Iraqi soldiers also took the opportunity for some personal bargain-hunting. "They took everything," said a Kuwaiti housewife: "televisions, radios, food, even dog food." The hunt for anti-Saddam activists was one opportunity for profit. When 23-year-old Kuwaiti student Faisal Abdulhadi was thrown in jail, he said, his family paid two videocassette recorders, two televisions and 3,000 Iraqi dinars for his release. A member of the Kuwaiti ruling family, Sheikh Badr Abdullah Mohammed al-Sabah, 30, said he promised gold and jewelry to the Iraqis after they took him to Baghdad for interrogation; he escaped from the bus that was taking him back to Kuwait to deliver the treasure.

I know you can't accept reality liberals.

But, newsflash: Kuwait is better off not being plundered by Iraq.

i don't think the only options available are psychopathic dictators or relics of post-colonial realpolitik

Yes, just flood the Iraqis with postplace.org posts until they leave.

Anyway I'm pretty sure Kuwaitis are glad they happened to be geostrategically important enough to be liberated from Iraqi imperialism.

on the other hand, they would never have been subject to said iraqi imperialism if the western imperialists hadn't prevented the creation of a pan-arab state.

Blaming the screwups of Third World Peoples on America- one of my favorite cards I've seen dealt!

Where were the Soviets? Why did they fail to defend the United Arab Republic?

addam was legitimately being screwed by Kuwait at the time and would have withdrawn peacefully

Fair point. Fair point.

We agree that Kuwait was liberated from Iraqi imperialism, but it could have been done more peacefully.

babyfinland posted:

HenryKrinkle posted:

would have withdrawn peacefully if certain issues surrounding slant drilling, OPEC quotas, foreign debt and access to the Persian Gulf were addressed.



ahhahahah no he wouldn't have

you guys are adorably naive, not only were communist countries absolute utopias by virtue of the planned economy, but anyone suffering the wrath of american capital is also a pure-hearted angel

The image of Saddam as Nebuchadnezzar II resurrected, raining fire and destruction down upon a bunch of corpulent sandals and bathrobe-wearing Kuwaitis who probably have lisps and sit around being fed grapes by their slave servants, is awesome, and all I need to believe about what occurred during the Gulf War.