LONDON: Disbelief. That was the reaction of Saudi general Prince Khalid bin Sultan when he answered the telephone at his home near Riyadh in the early hours of Aug. 2, 1990, and learnt that Iraq had invaded Kuwait.
The general had been entertaining friends at a barbecue, and they were still sipping coffee when the phone rang.
“War was the farthest thing from my mind,” Prince Khalid recalled in an article he wrote in 1993. “Arabs may disagree, but they don’t usually invade each other.”
The prince’s disbelief was shared by the rest of the world.
Now, 35 years on, the avalanche of consequences triggered by Iraq’s unprovoked invasion of its tiny southern neighbor continues to reverberate — in Kuwait and the entire region.
