IT ALL GETS MORE COMPLICATED

The Gulf crisis must have looked fairly simple to the participants when it started. Saddam Hussein assumed he could walk into Kuwait, confronted by little more than the odd ritual denunciation from the UN Security Council and some timid squeaks of protest from the GCC states. The Bush administration thought that it could put a lot of firepower in place and show who, in the last event, was in control. No-one seems to have thought through the possible subsequent sequence of events and – to be fair – neither side could have been expected to predict their course.