Persian Gulf War Notes Part 1
The Gulf War was the first major international crisis of the post-Cold War era. As President Bush himself remarked in the aftermath of the war, this was the first crisis in nearly half a century that wasn’t somehow connected to the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Gulf War was perhaps the most efficient war in American history, in terms of the cost in American lives. It proved to the world the potent force of US technology and US military doctrine. Years after the war’s end, however, there are disagreements about whether the US was justified in waging war against Iraq and over whether the war was prosecuted far enough.
At 2 a.m., August 2, 1990, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ordered some 80,000 Iraqi troops to invade and occupy neighboring Kuwait, a small, oil-rich emirate on the Persian Gulf. Alarmed by these actions, fellow Arab powers such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt called on the United States and other Western nations to intervene. Hussein defied United Nations Security Council demands to withdraw from Kuwait by mid-January 1991, and the Persian Gulf War began with a massive U.S.-led air offensive known as Operation Desert Storm. After 42 days of relentless attacks by the allied coalition in the air and on the ground, U.S. President George H.W. Bush declared a cease-fire on February 28; by that time, most Iraqi forces in Kuwait had either surrendered or fled. Though the Persian Gulf War was initially considered an unqualified success for the international coalition, simmering conflict in the troubled region led to a 2nd Gulf War–known as the Iraq War–that began in 2003.
Though the long-running Iran-Iraq War had ended in a United Nations-brokered ceasefire in August 1988, by mid-1990 the two states had yet to begin negotiating a permanent peace treaty. When their foreign ministers met in Geneva that July, prospects for peace in the region suddenly seemed bright. However, Iraq’s economy was severely strained by debt accumulated during the war with Iran. Two weeks later, Hussein delivered a speech in which he leveled several accusations against Kuwait:
He accused Kuwait of using slant-drilling techniques to siphon crude oil from the Ar-Rumaylah oil fields located along their common border.
He insisted that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia cancel out $30 billion of Iraq’s foreign debt from the Iran-Iraq war, which, he claimed, was fought to protect fellow Sunni nations (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) from Iran—which is Shia.
He accused them of conspiring to keep oil prices low in an effort to pander to Western oil-buying nations, which undermined the Iraqi economy.
These recent accusations were in addition to the long-standing Iraqi grievance that Kuwait’s territory historically belonged to Iraq, and that the British had artificially and unlawfully carved out and created Kuwait. Iraq had unsuccessfully made this claim to the UN in 1961 and again in 1973.
In addition to Hussein’s incendiary speech, Iraq had begun amassing troops on Kuwait’s border. Alarmed by these actions, The President of Egypt initiated negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait in an effort to avoid intervention by the United States or other powers from outside the Gulf region. Hussein broke off the negotiations after only two hours, and on August 2, 1990 ordered the invasion of Kuwait. Hussein’s assumption that his fellow Arab states would stand by in the face of his invasion of Kuwait, and not call in outside help to stop it, proved to be a miscalculation. Two-thirds of the 21 members of the Arab League condemned Iraq’s act of aggression, and Saudi Arabia, along with Kuwait’s government-in-exile, turned to the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for support.
Osama bin Laden, a Saudi himself, offered to protect Saudi Arabia with a sizable, well-equipped, and battle-hardened guerrilla force established during the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. His offer emphasized a need to let fellow Muslims defend the country, rather than allowing American ‘infidel’ forces into the ‘Holy Land’. The Saudi rejection of bin Laden’s offer would later fuel his declaration of war on the US in 1996.
Iraq's invasion caught the United States off guard. Neither observers on the ground nor Western intelligence agencies were able to say what Saddam intended to do next. Would Saddam be content to annex Kuwait? Did he plan to also seize Saudi Arabia? The entire Arabian peninsula? To this day, we do not know, and history may never reveal it.
The Hussein regime was a brutal military dictatorship that ruled by secret police and used poison gas against Iranians, Kurds, and Shiite Muslims. During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States--and Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and West Germany--sold Iraq an awesome arsenal that included missiles, tanks, and the equipment needed to produce biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. During Baghdad's eight-year-long war with Iran, the United States, which opposed the growth of Muslim fundamentalist extremism, tilted toward Iraq.
U.S. President George H.W. Bush immediately condemned the invasion, as did the governments of Britain and the Soviet Union. On August 3, the United Nations Security Council called for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait; three days later, King Fahd met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to request U.S. military assistance. On August 8, the day on which the Iraqi government formally annexed Kuwait, 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 accompanied by troops sent by NATO allies as well as Egypt and several other Arab nations, designed to guard against a possible Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia.
In Kuwait, Iraq increased its occupation forces to some 300,000 troops. In an effort to garner support from the Muslim world, Hussein declared a jihad, or holy war, against the coalition; he also attempted to ally himself with the Palestinian cause by offering to evacuate Kuwait in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. When these efforts failed, Hussein concluded a hasty peace with Iran so as to bring his army up to full strength.
On August 6, 1990, President Bush dramatically declared, "This aggression will not stand." With Iraqi forces poised near the Saudi Arabian border, the Bush administration dispatched 180,000 troops to protect the Saudi kingdom. This effort was called “Operation Desert Shield”. In a sharp departure from American foreign policy during the Reagan presidency, Bush also organized an international coalition against Iraq. Bush convinced Middle Eastern countries Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Syria to close Iraqi oil pipelines, won rare Soviet support for an arms embargo against a former client state, and established a multi-national army to protect Saudi Arabia. In the United Nations, the administration succeeded in persuading the Security Council to adopt a series of resolutions condemning the Iraqi invasion, demanding restoration of the Kuwaiti government, and imposing an economic blockade.
Bush's decision to resist Iraqi aggression reflected the president's assessment of vital national interests. Iraq's invasion gave Saddam Hussein direct control over a 20% of the world's oil supply (10% Iraq & 10% Kuwait), and he was poised to take over an additional 20% by conquering Saudi Arabia. Control of 40% of the world’s oil would enable Saddam to hold the global economy hostage. These actions also disrupted the Middle East balance of power. Iraq's army threatened the security of such valuable U.S. allies as Egypt and Israel.
In November 1990, the crisis took a dramatic turn. President Bush doubled the size of American forces deployed in the Persian Gulf, a sign that the administration was prepared to eject Iraq from Kuwait by force. The president went to the United Nations for a resolution permitting the use of force against Iraq if it did not withdraw by January 15, 1991. On November 29, 1990, the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of “all necessary means” of force against Iraq if it did not withdraw from Kuwait by the following January 15. By January, the coalition forces prepared to face off against Iraq numbered some 750,000, including 540,000 U.S. personnel and smaller forces from Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among other nations. Iraq, for its part, had the support of Jordan, Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Tunisia and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. After a heated debate, the US Congress also gave President Bush the authority to wage war.
President Bush's decision to liberate Kuwait was an enormous political and military gamble. The Iraqi army, the world's fourth largest, was equipped with Exocet missiles, top-of-the-line Soviet T-72 tanks, and long-range artillery capable of firing nerve gas. Iraq had deployed more than half a million soldiers dug into defensive positions. The allied coalition had more than 640,000. What would be the cost in terms of allied casualties when these 2 forces collided? Estimates ran as high as 30,000 casualties.
The US military was employing a new doctrine as it emerged from the shadow of the so-called Vietnam syndrome. The new doctrine attempted to address the challenge that the American people would withdraw their support if a war was not going their way---an extremely important consideration for American politicians. The new doctrine would entail the use of overwhelming military force so that, in future wars, victory was to be won so quickly that neither the enemy, nor Congress, nor the American people would have time to react. The US military had already given this doctrine a successful test run during the invasion of Panama.