In November 1990, ITN's Trevor McDonald travelled to Baghdad for an hour-long interview with Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein. Months earlier, on 2 August 1990, Saddam had sent Iraqi tanks across the border into Kuwait, subjected the country to a brutal military occupation, and declared Kuwait to be the 19th province of Iraq. The invasion of Kuwait was immediately met with international condemnation. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, neighbouring Iraq and Kuwait, invited the US to station troops in the kingdom to protect against an Iraqi invasion. US President George HW Bush and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher responded by deploying troops to Saudi Arabia and urging other countries to follow suit. Within weeks, a US-led coalition of 35 countries was amassing military forces in the region in an operation named Desert Shield, while the United Nations was issuing resolutions calling for Iraq's withdrawal. At the time of Trevor McDonald's interview with Saddam, the Arabian peninsular was witnessing the build-up of the largest military alliance that had been formed since the Second World War.
In his interview, Saddam blamed the Kuwaiti royal family for the invasion, accusing them of conspiring against Iraq. Rejecting the idea that the international community was united in condemnation, Saddam denounced the US and the UK as aggressors who had goaded the United Nations Security Council into making "hasty resolutions" against Iraq. The Iraqi leader accused the United Nations of double standards, alleging inaction over the issue of Israel and Palestine, and accusing the US of conspiring against the Palestinians. When questioned by Trevor McDonald about reports of atrocities against Kuwaiti civilians, Saddam said he had heard nothing of such reports and stated they were probably false. He ended the interview by reasserting that Iraq was opposed not by a unified coalition but by the US and the UK, who had conspired with each other to bully and threaten the rest of the world into supporting their invasion of sacred Muslim lands.
Trevor McDonald's interview with Saddam Hussein is of enormous historical significance. It was recorded in the heat of an international crisis that would culminate in the launching of Operation Desert Storm and the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The enmity between Saddam and the West is one that would persist until the Iraqi Ba'ath regime was toppled following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. And the sentiment expressed by Saddam in this 1991 interview that Britain and America were conspiring to invade Muslim nations found a receptive audience in nascent jihadi organisations in the region. When al-Qa`ida (Al Qaeda) leader Usama Bin Laden declared war on the United States nearly six years later, on 23 August 1996, he cited the continued military presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia ("the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites") as his reason. In the years between the Gulf War and 9/11, the Iraqi regime was an international pariah and the subject of sanctions and weapons inspections. Only days after 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration raised Iraq as a potential target in its retaliatory War on Terror.
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