Hacker News Reader

Comment by finid | Hacker News Reader

The invasion of Iraq, which the New York Times played a major role in, tore the ME apart.

Very soon we'll be blaming some other group for Libya and Syria.

The Saudis and Kuwaitis gave the US 30 billion dollars to attack Iraq for the first gulf war. After giving Iraq a loan of 25 billion to attack Iran, which basically put Iraq in a difficult financial position which the Kuwaitis and the Saudis would not help it get out of it by cutting their supply, so he threatened them with war http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/18/business/iraq-threatens-em... But at the end of the day who gave Saudis all this money, which ended with a bunch of backward tribal nomads running international political schemes? The Americans built Saudis from scratch, and their little monster now rocks the cradle.

> Kuwaitis and the Saudis would not help it get out of.

There is long distance between 'would not help' and 'drop all your debt claims against me'.

Nobody had forced Saddam to invade Iran. He took the risk and took the debt knowingly. He then turned around and and claimed 'I did all of this for you, so I don't have to pay anything back'.

The Americans did help to build the Saudis, but the Saudis would almost certainly have succeeded without the Americans as well. Saudi Arabia was never a America child.

That news article does not say that SA funded the Iraq-Iran war:

"Both Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates provided financial backing for Iraq's eight-year war against Iran, which ended in an armistice in 1988."

i have been reading lately how the direction of Saudi Arabia changed dramatically after the seizing of the Grand Mosque.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure

It is interesting that Iran blamed the United States for that, and mobs burned down a US embassy because of the propaganda. Does anything actually point to US involvement?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com