he Gulf states’ refusal to cancel Iraq’s war debts contributed to Saddam Hussein’s decision to make threats against Iraq’s rich, but militarily weak neighbour, Kuwait. After the Kingdom rejected Saddam’s proposal to cancel the debt, he threatened to reignite a conflict over the long-standing issue of ownership of the Warbah and Bubiyan Islands. This was important to Iraq because of the access afforded to its ports, such as Um Qasr, on the Khawr Abd Allah - the waterway to the Persian Gulf which remained the only viable alternative to the closed Shatt Al-’Arab, cluttered with debris from the Iran-Iraq war. The dispute over the Bubiyan and Warbah Islands was a key point of contention in the lengthy history of territorial conflict between Iraq and Kuwait. Years earlier in 1961, when the United Kingdom ended its protectorate over Kuwait, the then Iraqi Prime Minister General Abd Al-Karim Qasim, claimed that Kuwait was an ‘integral part of Iraq’ because it had been part of the former Ottoman province of Al-Basrah, a province in the south of Iraq. Baghdad threatened to exert its sovereignty over Kuwait, but the deployment of Royal Marine Commandos to the region forced the Iraqis to back down. Although subsequent regimes relinquished this claim and accepted Kuwait’s independence, Iraq’s Ba’athist party never formally accepted a common boundary between the two countries. By 1990, Iraq’s economy was in free-fall as the cost of the Iran-Iraq war pushed inflation up and depressed oil prices. In July, Saddam accused Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates of breaking the production quotas agreed with the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), who he said were over-producing crude oil for export, which further depressed prices. Iraq was now being starved of critical oil revenues and Baghdad
