Absolute and Relative Power

          Parasiliti does note “the analytical distinction between absolute and relative power,”[4] but he sees state decision-making as a function of its power “scored relative to the other states of the system,” not its absolute power in “rigid analytical” distinction from the international system.[5]  Thus he cannot distinguish wars stimulated by (relative) power struggles from those prompted by (absolute) existential threats.  The problem is not that Parasiliti does a poor job of comparing these two motives’ applicability to the Iraqi case study.  Instead, his power cycle theory precludes the very possibility that Saddam invaded Kuwait in order to keep Iraq.  He comes closest to addressing that possibility in his critique of a ‘preventive war thesis’:

While a case can be made that revolutionary Iran posed a challenge or threat to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1980, the preventive war approach would not account for the finding that Iran was in relative decline at the time of Iraq’s invasion.  Attacking a bigger opponent that is already in decline does not fit well with the assumptions of ‘preventive war.’  Furthermore, Kuwait could not be characterized as a rival to Iraq for regional hegemony in 1990.”[6]

This argument has two key flaws, not including Parasiliti’s earlier and contradictory claim that Iraq attacked Iran because the latter was beginning to gain on the former.[7]

          First, power cycle theory stipulates that no war can be ‘preventive’ unless power shifts work against the preempting party – regardless of its target’s absolute strength,[8] and however much that strength may animate its target’s threatening intentions.  Parasiliti himself may accept these implications of power cycle theory, but he fails to show why his readers should.

          Second, Parasiliti is correct to claim that tiny Kuwait was not the target of an Iraqi ‘preventive war’ (however he defines that term), but this is a straw man argument.  Saddam’s adversary was the U.S., of which he considered Kuwait an agent.[9]  Whether Hussein invaded Kuwait to keep the Iraqi economy afloat[10] or to seize “control over the oil-producing Gulf,”[11] his goals evolved “[in] the larger context of his strategic image of the United States as an unrelenting enemy determined to destroy his regime through economic warfare and covert action.”[12]

Perceptions of Power

          A key component of this “sense of threat”[13] explanation is Saddam’s belief in the “deeply rooted and easily available stereotype” of American imperialism and conspiracy against Arab nationalist regimes.[14]  However, this stereotype’s very longevity raises the question of (a) why Saddam did not invade Kuwait earlier or later than August 1990.  Similarly, while the “opportunity of gain”[15] explanation posits that Kuwaiti wealth enticed Saddam, this premise raises the question of (b) why Saddam did not seize this wealth earlier or later than he actually did.[16]  Yet while Parasiliti cannot answer Question (b), Gause and Janice Gross Stein resolve Question (a):

          First, the losses of relative power which Parasiliti identifies as triggers of the Iraqi invasion[17] occur in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in 1990.[18]  Moreover, by ignoring the impact on nuclear weapons on international relations,[19] he avoids explaining why “Baghdad did not postpone the invasion for a year or two until its nuclear program had generated a small arsenal of weapons.”[20]

          Second, Gause and Stein answer Question (a) by chronicling a seismic historical change that magnified Saddam’s fears that the U.S. and the Gulf states were conspiring against him: the end of the Cold War.[21]  Now that the U.S. “was no longer constrained and contained by the Soviet Union,”[22] Saddam feared that Iraq would share the fate of the “Soviet client states in Eastern Europe”[23] as “America [coordinated] with Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Kuwait in a conspiracy against us.”[24]  The end of the Cold War, then, appears to explain Iraq’s behavior better than any shift in relative power diagrammed by Parasiliti.

          In any event, this historical backdrop highlighted various U.S. and Gulf state political and economic policies, which together form the basis of Iraqi allegations of an “international conspiracy”: Kuwaiti and UAE overproduction of oil, leading to lower prices; reductions in U.S. aid and political support for Iraq; unfavorable Western media coverage of Saddam’s regime; suspicions of American-British-Israeli efforts to halt Iraq’s nuclear weapons program; the Iran-contra affair; and a belief that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia “were attempting to infiltrate Iraqi society to collect intelligence and pressure the government.”[25]  Thus Iraq’s economic troubles, detailed exhaustively by Kiren Aziz Chaudhry,[26] fit into Saddam’s perceptions “of a more general plan aimed at weakening Iraq” – a profoundly “encompassing sense of threat.”[27]

          Gause’s approach, then, lets him quote not only Saddam’s speech to the Revolutionary Command Council cited at the conclusion of Parasiliti’s analysis and at the beginning of this paper, but another speech made by a senior Iraqi leader in the same meeting – a speech which reflects Hussein’s fears that American conspiracies posed an existential threat to his regime:

Yes, the battle is inevitable….America decided to stop exporting technology to us after April 1990, and America stopped agricultural facilities [subsidized exports to Iraq] in March 1990….How were we going to maintain the loyalty of the people and their support for the leader if they saw the inability of the leadership to provide a minimal standard of living in this rich country?...I am not deviating from my deep faith in victory in this battle, but whatever the outcome, if death is definitely coming to this people and this revolution, let it come while we are standing.[28]