ABSTRACT
Iraq’s initiative in forming the Arab Cooperation Council in February 1989 and its April 1989 non-aggression pact with Saudi Arabia can be seen in that light. Sa‘d al-Bazzaz, editor of one of the major Iraqi papers in the period before and during the Gulf War, reports on a series of meetings beginning in mid-June 1990 that formulated the plan for the invasion. The most popular explanation for Saddam Husayn’s decision to invade Kuwait in 1990 is some combination of offensive realism and the innate aggressiveness of dictators in general and Saddam in particular. To complete the argument, the people need to return to the major alternative explanation for the 1990 decision, an offensive realist reading. The people argument about the link between domestic regime security and war initiation in Iraqi decision-making starts from the assumption that the first goal of any leader is to stay in power.
