Saddam and Sura 105 [The Elephant]

The Economist has a useful short-bio obituary in its latest edition titled The Blundering Dictator.

I can remember talking to Dr. Issam Chalabi, the Iraqi Oil Minister at the OPEC meeting in July 1990, and he assured me that Saddam was just blustering when he threatened Kuwait because it demanded repayment of the Iran-Iraq War loans. Saddam had concocted a story that Kuwait had horizontal rigs sucking Iraqi oil from across the border in Kuwait. That sounded crazy. No one expected Saddam to invade Kuwait.

Saddam explains it in this paragraph:

he blew it all by invading Kuwait, the small, rich neighbouring emirate, on August 2nd 1990. Asked in later years, following his capture in a "spider hole" by American invaders, why he had done this, Saddam first blustered that it was because Kuwait was rightfully Iraq's 19th province. Then, in his slightly nasal whine, he growled, "When I get something into my head I act. That's just the way I am."

Perhaps apocryphal or for religious consumption, he did claim in the nineties that he discovered that George Herbert Walker Bush's Republican Party had the Elephant as its symbol, and his mind was drawn to Sura 105 of the Quran referring to The Elephant of Ethiopian invaders being attacked by small birds dropping stones or clay shards which defeated the Ethiopian expedition against Mecca. This purportedly happened the year of Muhammad's birth.
And so Saddam invaded Kuwait.

Who knows what Saddam was smoking or drinking, but he got this into his head and believed that he could defeat the awesome US Armies [the Elephant] with the birds.

Actually, that didn't work out in Kuwait, but symbolically it can be said that thousands of insurgent atrocities are having the cumulative effect of overcoming a militarily invincible US Army. But armies don't lose wars by battlefield defeats, as generals since Hannibal have been discovering on a regular basis.

Saddam may have been right in the end, but his timing, as usual, was off a bit.