...In terms of U.S. land-based access to Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have each bowed out of the picture for internal political reasons, and the overland route from Jordan through Anbar Province is both very long and very insecure. The other two neighbors, Iran and Syria, are unfriendly. Kuwait thus provides an essential corridor to the central portions of Iraq, which has lately been a quiet but crucial element in U.S. policy planning for the region. In other words, in the uncharacteristically blunt language of a
July 2007 paper from the Department of State: “Kuwait provides indispensable support in terms of access to its facilities, resources, and land to support military operations in Iraq.” Its major ports and airfields are in constant use by U.S. forces and contractors....
....In addition, small and vulnerable as it may be, Kuwait remains (in Anthony Cordesman’s phrase) “of major strategic importance as an oil power.” It boasts approximately 10 percent of the entire planet’s proven reserves, and its daily production of nearly 2.5 million barrels is both larger and more reliable than that of Iraq. This was the prize for which the U.S. first went to war against Saddam, a war in which Kuwait served as the first line of defense for Saudi Arabia as well. Yet Kuwait has a native population not even one-tenth that of Saudi Arabia. Kuwaitis number barely one-twentieth of Iraq’s population, and, with just 15,000 men under arms, barely one-tenth the armed forces even of Iraq’s current fledgling regime. The comparison with Iran is even starker; Iranians outnumber Kuwaitis by something like seventy to one.
The main issue now is thus not what Kuwait can do for Iraq, or against Iran, but how to keep Kuwait from being somehow engulfed in the turmoil and violence of its much larger northern neighbor—or in the regional ambitions of its even larger Iranian neighbor just across the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf. As long as it is protected, Kuwait is an irreplaceable land bridge to Iraq and a key contributor both to global energy supplies and to the international “recycling” of petrodollars.
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