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In doing the kind of work that we do, its essential that we know and work well with each other. For example, I have known a number of people at the Center, including Dr. Volkan, for almost fifteen years, and I think there are some on this panel who have known each other and worked with each other for more than three decades. An immature group going into an international situation and trying to enact Track II
diplomacy is going to have terrible struggles within itself just in trying to understand what's going on in the groups that they are working with. This was certainly the case in our visit to Kuwait, where the maturity of our group enhanced our ability to be effective.
The invasion and occupation of Kuwait was clearly a traumatic experience for Kuwaitis. Kuwait is a very modern society, a small society of approximately 600,000 people. It is a society interlinked by family and very close. While it is an Islamic society, it is quite cosmopolitan, probably because of its long history in trade. As a State, Kuwait dates back to before the United States, approximately 1750, the first time that Europeans put it on the map.
On August 2, as one of the Kuwaitis we spoke with said, it was like a bad dream: the Iraqis rushed over the border into Kuwait. Certainly, the distance was small, and it was made even smaller by the modern highways that they drove their tanks and armored vehicles down. In addition to brutalizing and terrorizing Kuwaiti people, Iraqi soldiers slaughtered, roasted, and ate the zoo animals, much to the horror of the Kuwaitis. To see their zoo transformed in such a way that the animals were being eaten by hungry Iraqi soldiers who had not been well-prepared for the occupation was a nightmare. We were also told by Kuwaitis that Iraqis took books from the library and burned them in order to make their coffee. One Kuwaiti called me at the University of Virginia a few years ago and asked for some basic references in Economics. These references had been there