Although the long Iran-Iraq war ended with a ceasefire brokered by the United Nations in August 1988, the two states had to start negotiations on a permanent peace treaty in mid-1990. When their foreign ministers met in Geneva in July, the prospects for peace suddenly looked bright as it appeared that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was ready to resolve this conflict and return the territory his troops had long occupied. Two weeks later, however, Hussein gave a speech in which he accused the neighboring state of Kuwait of siphoning off crude oil from the Ar-Rumaylah oil fields along their common border. He insisted that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia write off Iraq's $ 30 billion foreign debt, accusing them of conspiring to keep oil prices down to pander to Western oil-buying nations.
When Kuwait, to no one's surprise, refused to lower its oil production, Saddam began what would become a short-lived military intervention in the neighboring oil-producing country! Did you know that Saddam Hussein, justifying his invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, claimed that it was an artificial state carved out of the Iraqi coast by Western colonialists?! In fact, Kuwait was recognized internationally as a separate entity before Iraq was created by Britain under the command of the League of Nations after WWI.
Saddam’s real motives to invade Kuwait were related to his need to replenish an impoverished Iraqi economy that had been severely undercut by the protracted and costly war against Iran, which resulted in more than 1.5 million estimated Iraqi and Iranian deaths!
Not quite grasping what the waning of the cold war would mean for his regional ambitions, Saddam still ordered the invasion and annexation of Kuwait!
photo from Wikimedia Commons
Warning of Iraq's actions, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak initiated negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait to avoid interference by the United States or other powers outside the Gulf region. Hussein broke off the negotiations just two hours later and ordered the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Hussein's assumption that his Arab allies would stand up to his invasion of Kuwait, and not call for outside help to stop it, was miscalculated. Two-thirds of the 21 members of the Arab League condemned the act of aggression in Iraq, and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, along with the Kuwaiti government in exile, favored the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)!
U.S. President George H.W. Bush immediately condemned the invasion, as did the British and Soviet governments. On August 3, the United Nations Security Council called on Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Three days later, King Fahd met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Richard Dick Cheney to seek U.S. military aid. On August 8, the day the Iraqi government officially annexed Kuwait (Hussein called it the “19th province”), the first U.S. Air Force fighter planes began arriving in Saudi Arabia as part of a military buildup dubbed Operation Desert Shield. The planes were escorted by troops deployed by NATO allies as well as Egypt and several other Arab countries to prevent a possible Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia.
In Kuwait, Iraq had increased its occupation forces to around 300,000 soldiers. To win the support of the Muslim world, Hussein declared a jihad, or holy war, against the coalition! He also tried to ally himself with the Palestinian cause by offering to evacuate Kuwait in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories! When those efforts failed, Hussein hastily made peace with Iran to bring his army to full strength!
photo: Wikimedia Commons
Iraq rolled over Kuwait in two days, and quite literally too... Whenever possible, Kuwaitis resisted fiercely, even establishing an underground resistance movement, though it was largely untrained and incapable. In trying to capture Kuwait’s Emir, Iraqis assaulted Dasman Palace, even though the Emir had already left. The Emir’s brother was killed leading the defense of the palace for more than 12 hours, outnumbered by an entire Iraqi division! His body was placed in front of a tank and run over!
On November 29, 1990, the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of "all necessary means" against Iraq if it did not withdraw from Kuwait by the following January 15. In January, coalition forces were preparing to face Iraq at about 750,000, including 540,000 US troops and smaller forces from Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, among other countries. Iraq, for its part, had the backing of Jordan (another vulnerable neighbor - poor Jordan!), Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Tunisia, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Early in the morning of January 17, 1991, a massive U.S.-led air offensive hit Iraq's air defenses, rapidly moving to its communications networks, weapons factories, oil refineries, and more. The coalition effort, known as Operation Desert Storm, benefited from the latest military technology, including Stealth bombers, Cruise missiles, so-called “Smart” bombs with laser-guidance systems, and infrared night-bombing equipment. The Iraqi Air Force was either destroyed early on or withdrawn from combat under relentless attack, the aim of which was to win the war in the air and minimize the fighting on the ground as much as possible.
A Kuwaiti M-84 main battle tank in Operation Desert Shield. (Wikimedia Commons)
By mid-February, coalition forces had focused their airstrikes on Iraqi ground forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq. On 24 February a massive Allied ground attack, Operation Desert Sabre, was launched with troops from northeastern Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and southern Iraq. Over the next four days, coalition forces surrounded and defeated the Iraqis and liberated Kuwait. At the same time, U.S. forces stormed Iraq about 120 miles west of Kuwait and attacked Iraq's armored reserves from behind. The elite of the Iraqi Republican Guard established a defense south of al-Basrah in south-eastern Iraq, but most were defeated by 27 February.
Curiosity: Military action included the systematic targeting of Iraqi infrastructure, including the sustained – and controversial – attack against retreating Iraqi military personnel along the road connecting Kuwait with Iraq, which was subsequently dubbed the “Highway of Death”. The Coalition also built fake bases and units to dupe Iraqis into defending the wrong area! They used deception cells to create the impression that they were going to attack near the Kuwaiti “boot heel,” as opposed to the strategy actually implemented. The Army set up FOB Weasel near the opposite end of the Kuwaiti border, which was a network of fake camps manned only by several dozen soldiers. With computer-controlled radios, messages were passed between fictitious headquarters sections. Smoke generators and loudspeakers playing prerecorded tank and truck noises were used, along with inflatable Humvees and helicopters.
The ‘Highway of Death’ where thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers were killed.PJF Military Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
As the Iraqi resistance neared collapse, Bush declared a ceasefire on February 28, ending the Gulf War! Under the peace terms that Hussein later accepted, Iraq would recognize Kuwait’s sovereignty and dispose of all of its weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons). A total of between 8,000 and 10,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed, compared to only 300 for the coalition! Actually, more Americans died of HIV infection in1991 than in Operation Desert Storm! And although the Gulf War was hailed as a decisive coalition victory, Kuwait and Iraq suffered enormous damage and Saddam Hussein did not have to resign from power!
Considered a "limited" war fought at the lowest possible cost by allied leaders, it would have lasting effects for years to come in the Persian Gulf region and even around the world! In the immediate aftermath of the war, Hussein's forces brutally suppressed the Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq and the Shi'ites in the south. The U.S.-led coalition did not support the uprising for fear that the Iraqi state would disintegrate if it succeeded. In the years that followed, American and British aircraft continued to patrol the skies and establish a no-fly zone over Iraq, while Iraqi authorities made every effort to frustrate the carrying out of the peace terms, especially United Nations weapons inspections. The result was a brief spate of hostilities in 1998, after which Iraq flatly refused to admit weapons inspectors.
Curiosity: Desert Storm was a relatively cheap war. The U.S. Department of Defense has estimated the cost of the Gulf War at $61 billion. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states covered $36 billion while Germany and Japan covered $16 billion. Still, as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (0.3%), Desert Storm was the cheapest war fought in U.S. history! The greater cost of the war to the region was likely more than $676 billion. Though the U.S. was the primary supplier, 39 countries contributed men and/or materiel to the Coalition in some significant way. Yeah, that’s Afghanistan in blue down there.
Coalition in blue vs. Iraq in orange
The result was a brief spate of hostilities in 1998, after which Iraq flatly refused to admit weapons inspectors. In addition, Iraqi forces regularly exchanged fire with U.S. and British aircraft on the no-fly zone. In 2002, the United States (led by former President George W. Bush, the son of the former president) sponsored a new U.N. resolution calling for the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq. In November, U.N. inspectors re-entered Iraq. Amid differences between Security Council member states over how well Iraq had complied with the inspections, the United States and Britain began mobilizing forces along the Iraqi border.
President Bush issued an ultimatum without further U.N. approval on March 17, 2003, demanding that Saddam Hussein step down from power and leave Iraq within 48 hours, under threat of war! Hussein refused, and the second Persian Gulf, known as the Iraq War, began three days later! Eventually, Saddam Hussein was arrested by U.S. forces on December 13, 2003, and executed on December 30, 2006, for committing numerous crimes against humanity! The United States will not formally withdraw from Iraq until December 2011.
There weren't many reasons to be "cheerful about the outcome of the war, but one of them was the extraordinary cooperation between the Americans and the Russians! Although Iraq was a major client of the Cold War in the region, the Soviet Union immediately approved the US-led military operation. In fact, at the time of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, US Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Secretary of State Edward Shevardnadze were in a meeting and immediately issued a joint statement condemning the Iraqi aggression against Iraq.
Declassified telephone conversation reveals the true US-Soviet difficulties. George H.W. Bush Presidential Library; National Security Archives digital collection edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, ‘Inside the Gorbachev-Bush Partnership on the First Gulf War 1990’.
Nevertheless, recently declassified sources also show that U.S.-Soviet cooperation back then was more difficult than the leaders’ statements led the world to assume at the time. Yet, speaking in October 1991, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev underlined that "without a radical improvement and then a radical change in Soviet-U.S. relations, we would never have witnessed the profound qualitative changes in the world that now make it possible to speak in terms of an entirely new age, an age of peace in world history".
He added that “the right conclusions have been drawn from the Gulf War.” But had they? In Iraq, Saddam remained in power, and bombing and sanctions against his regime continued under Bill Clinton’s presidency. The then-president George W. Bush even declared a new war against Iraq with the disputed justification of Iraq’s alleged development of weapons of mass destruction!
The truth is that many commentators saw the conflict as a way to deal with the “unfinished business” of the first Gulf War started by Bush’s father. Military “contractors” flooded into Iraq, which caused complex consequences that are still playing out! More than that, the last act of Donald Trump's US presidency was actually to pardon four Blackwater security contractors! These were responsible for the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, a shooting that killed 14 Iraqi civilians, including nine-year-old Ali Abdul Razzaq! U.N. human rights experts condemned the presidential pardon as an affront to international justice!
U.S. Army photo
All in all, the war of the early 2000s left behind a severely weakened Iraqi state infrastructure, and a high death toll. It was a situation that made Iraq easy prey to the Islamic State Forces, which took over Mosul in 2014 and carried on a legacy of violence and brutalization. Many saw the end of the Gulf War in 1991 as the beginning of an “era of peace”! The hope at that time was that the country, and the region, could thrive. Instead, the February 28 ceasefire marked the end of a remarkably brief conflict, but whose consequences and unforeseen outcomes can still be felt today!
Curiosity: Israel had the third-largest casualty count, despite not being in the war! Iraq fired Scud missiles at Israel in an attempt to draw the country into the conflict, a move that would force many Arab states in the Coalition to choose between withdrawing or fighting alongside Israel, neither of which were appealing to the Arabs! In response, the U.S. and Netherlands deployed Patriot Missile Battalions to Israel and Turkey to keep Israel from retaliating. The Gulf War ended up marking the first mid-air missile-to-missile interception!
And also, Saddam Hussein publicly apologized for the Invasion of Kuwait, well, sort of. The Iraqi information minister, Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf, who also announced in 2003 that there were no U.S. troops in Baghdad as U.S. troops were rapidly capturing most of the city, read a statement: “We apologize for what happened to you in the past,” he read for the Iraqi dictator. “The devoted and the holy warriors in Kuwait met with Iraqi counterparts” under their common creator against the “infidel armies” of “London, Washington, and the Zionist entity.”
So yeah, I really hope you've enjoyed today's post and would love to know what you think about it! I'll leave you with another video if you want some extra info and a slightly different perspective of what happened in the Gulf War:
See you next time!
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