i am gonna go with marion on this...after bush 1 used his veto to stop saddam from being censored by the un...saddam saw no reason to think his invading kuwait would be that troublesome to bush....
Washington’s complicity in Hussein’s crimes
President Bush is fond of citing the Anfal campaign and accusing Hussein of “gassing his own people,” but the chief international backer of the Baathist regime in the 1980s was the US itself. If Hussein and his lieutenants are to be put on trial for the murder of Kurds then standing alongside them in the dock should be the surviving members of the Reagan administration, including Bush’s own father, who was Reagan’s vice-president, and the present defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was Reagan’s special envoy to Iraq in 1983-84. Moreover, the secret archives of the CIA, Pentagon and State Department should be opened up to reveal the true extent of Washington’s complicity in all of Hussein’s crimes.
Still reeling from the collapse of the pro-US dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979, the Reagan administration encouraged Hussein to launch a war on Iran as a means of containing the new Islamic regime in Tehran. When despite initial defeats the Iranian army began to turn the tide on the Iraqi military, Reagan moved to shore up the Baathists. In February 1982, despite objections from Congress, the US administration removed Iraq from the official American list of state sponsors of terrorism and thus the ban on providing financial and military assistance to the Hussein regime.
In his capacity of special envoy, Rumsfeld was pivotal in US negotiations with Hussein that culminated in the resumption of formal diplomatic relations in late 1984. As early as 1983, Washington was aware that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons against Iranian troops in contravention of international law. As stories of horrific gassings began to emerge in 1984, the US formally “censured” Iraq but at the same time dispatched Rumsfeld to Baghdad to assure Hussein that its support for his war and for the normalisation of diplomatic relations was “undiminished”.
The full story of US support for the Iraqi regime is yet to be told. But there is ample evidence that the Reagan administration provided Hussein with billions of dollars in credits, military intelligence including satellite data on Iranian troop movements and assistance in military planning, as well as giving the green light for US allies in Europe and the Middle East to provide military hardware and aid. American and European firms supplied Iraq with the essential ingredients for the development and manufacture of chemical and biological weapons.
In the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for instance, a US-sponsored UN resolution required Baghdad to provide a full accounting of its “weapons of mass destruction”, which by that time had all been dismantled. Iraq responded with an 11,000-page report, then was immediately censored by Washington to remove details of US and European involvement in Iraq’s WMD programs. The German newspaper
Die Tageszeitung obtained an uncensored copy of the report, which listed 22 prominent American corporations including well-known names such as Bechtel, Dupont, Rockwell and Honeywell, along with many European companies. “From about 1975 onwards, these companies are shown to have supplied entire complexes, building elements, basic materials and technical know-how for Saddam Hussein’s program to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction,” the newspaper wrote.
The Reagan administration’s support was political and diplomatic as well as material. In March 1986, as evidence of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons became overwhelming, the US and Britain used their veto to block a motion in the UN Security Council condemning Iraq. Moreover, the US was the only country to vote against a non-binding UN Security Council statement on the same issue. Increasingly, US agencies responded allegations of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons with a conscious campaign of deception and disinformation, claiming that the Iranian military was also using poison gas.
New charges of genocide against Hussein over Kurdish “Anfal” campaign
PS: You won't get any fairy kisses here. 
