“We had to avoid giving the impression that western ‘colonialists’ had unilaterally imposed their will,” explained Schwarzkopf. To that end, he convened a regular “Arab reaction seminar” to assess how locals might perceive the military’s actions. Yet no amount of precaution could change the basic fact that one country was stationing its troops in another’s land. It’s not hard to imagine how the people of the United States would have reacted to a Saudi base in, say, Texas.
