Gulf War

The Event After Iraq invades and occupies Kuwait, a thirty-four-nation coalition of military forces responds by attacking the Iraqi army, driving it out of Kuwait

Date January 17–February 28, 1991

Place The Persian Gulf, the waterway linking Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and several other countries with the Arabian Sea

Iraqi aggression against Kuwait and Saudi Arabia was stopped, thereby preventing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from controlling most of the world’s known oil reserves.

When the modern Iraqi state was established after World War I, Kuwait was created as a separate state, although historically the two countries had been governed together from the capital in Baghdad. During the spring of 1990, Iraq presented demands on Kuwait and opened negotiations with the country, while massing troops along the southern border with Kuwait, presumably poised for an offensive to settle such disputes as the location of the border between the two countries.

As Iraqi troops were moving south toward Kuwait, American ambassador April Glaspie was summoned by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on July 25, 1990, to inform her of Iraq’s grievances with Kuwait and of his promise to resolve the issues peacefully. After expressing concern over the threat posed by the troop movements, she indicated that the United States was neutral toward disputes between Arab-speaking countries.

Subsequently, during a congressional hearing, an assistant secretary of state reported that there were no contingency plans to repel an attack by Iraq on Kuwait, as the United States had no military alliance with either country. Baghdad interpreted American disinterest as a green light for Iraq to annex Kuwait.

Iraq’s Attack and the Immediate Response

On August 2, a full-scale Iraqi attack was launched on Kuwait, whereupon Washington summoned the UN Security Council for an emergency meeting that resulted in a resolution calling on Iraq to withdraw. Four days later, as Iraq took control of Kuwait, the Security Council authorized economic sanctions. On August 7, the United States dispatched two aircraft carriers and two battleship groups to the Persian Gulf and, on the pretext that Iraq might also invade Saudi Arabia, airlifted troops to the latter country.

With American backing, the Security Council on November 29 demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait by January 15, 1991. To enforce the resolution, the Security Council authorized the use of force. US president George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker then persuaded thirty-four other countries to form a coalition to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Although all were aware that Iraq had violated the UN Charter by waging aggressive war, some countries were attracted to join the coalition by American promises of aid or debt forgiveness.

Differing peace proposals were offered. Whereas the United States demanded that Iraq unconditionally withdraw from Kuwait, Baghdad offered to pull out of Kuwait only if Syrian troops pulled out of Lebanon and Israeli troops abandoned the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Palestinian West Bank. Iraq’s terms were rejected. On January 12, 1991, Congress authorized Bush to wage war on Iraq despite sizeable votes against the operation.

The War

Code-named Operation Desert Storm, some 660,000 troops were ultimately mobilized to attack Iraq on January 17, 1991; the American portion was about 74 percent. The initial offensive consisted of aerial attacks on Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia and in western Iraq, followed by a bombardment of Baghdad. The initial aim was to destroy the Iraqi air force; next, bombing sought to disrupt command communications. Later, the remaining military targets and relevant infrastructure were bombed.

Iraq responded with ineffective antiaircraft fire, attempted to send airplanes and naval forces to Iran, dumped oil into the Persian Gulf, attacked a town inside Saudi Arabia and was easily repelled, and launched missiles at Israel, which shot them down but otherwise refrained from involvement in the war. Thanks to American air supremacy, coalition ground forces decisively entered Kuwait in late January. The war was extensively covered around the clock on the Cable News Network (CNN), including live reporting of flashes of light from bombardments and the launching of artillery.

On February 2, Iraq accepted a cease-fire agreement proposed by Russia. The terms involved a withdrawal of Iraqi troops to preinvasion positions within three weeks, followed by a total cease-fire and UN Security Council monitoring of the cease-fire and withdrawal. The United States rejected the proposal, demanding that Iraq exit from Kuwait within twenty-four hours, during which time the coalition would not attack Iraqi troops.

Since negotiations were deadlocked, American, British, and French forces attacked inside Iraq, exposing the vulnerability of Hussein’s military defenses. On February 26, Iraqi troops began to leave Kuwait, setting fire to oil fields as they exited, but coalition forces bombed the retreating columns up to 150 miles south of Baghdad. On February 27, President Bush declared that the war was over, that Kuwait had been liberated.

After Iraq surrendered, Baghdad was allowed to use armed helicopters to assist in rebuilding damaged transportation infrastructure that was being used by retreating forces. From March 10, coalition troops began to withdraw from Iraq, some staying in Kuwait and in Saudi Arabia to ensure security against future Iraq aggression.

Aftermath

On February 2, a radio station in Saudi Arabia operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) called on Shiites to rebel inside Iraq. Similar statements encouraged Kurds in the north to try to topple Hussein. However, when the rebellions occurred after Hussein surrendered, Iraq’s helicopters gunned down the rebels, and American forces did nothing in support.

The Security Council responded to massacres of Kurds and Shiites by establishing no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, respectively, to be enforced by American, British, and French military aircraft. Nevertheless, Hussein’s antiaircraft and surface-to-air missiles challenged the enforcement, resulting in frequent sorties thereafter to bomb both types of installations. In a sense, the Gulf War did not end in 1991 but continued right up to 2003.

Iraq’s remaining air force was also used to suppress rebellions between the two no-fly zones. Although some Saudi officials urged that the no-fly zone be extended over the entire country in order to facilitate those seeking to overthrow Hussein, their suggestion was ignored during the rest of the 1990s.

A UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) was assigned to inspect Iraq’s compliance with a Security Council order to dismantle all weapons of mass destruction. In 1999, UNSCOM left Iraq, which claimed that all such programs had been dismantled. The Security Council then authorized the replacement of UNSCOM with the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), which did not begin work in Iraq until 2002, when the United States claimed that weapons of mass destruction remaining in the country constituted a serious threat.

When casualty numbers for the war were assessed, some 146 Americans had died in battle, and 467 had been wounded. Other members of the coalition had lost 65 soldiers, and 319 had been wounded. However, more than 25 percent of the ground troops were declared permanently disabled by the Department of Veterans Affairs, suffering from unknown causes that have been characterized as the Gulf War syndrome. Estimates of Iraq casualties differ; there were at least 24,000 deaths, including 4,000 civilians.

The conduct of the war, including the use of cluster bombs and daisy cutters as well as the number of civilian deaths, prompted some observers to accuse the United States of committing war crimes. In 2003, a war crimes case based on the Gulf War was filed in a Belgian court against former president Bush, former secretary of defense Dick Cheney, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell, and former commander in chief Norman Schwarzkopf. Later in the year, after the United States threatened to move headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from Belgium to protest the case and similar pending lawsuits, the case was dismissed.

Impact

Constrained by economic sanctions and two no-fly zones, living conditions in Iraq nosedived while Kuwait enjoyed increasing prosperity. Economic sanctions remained on Iraq despite the devastation of its infrastructure. Insufficient food and medicine were available for ordinary people, so the United Nations agreed to establish an oil-for-food program, which ultimately involved kickbacks to Hussein. United Nations corruption, as later reviewed, led to calls for reform of the organization, especially by officials in the administration of President George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, the presence of American troops remaining in Saudi Arabia after the war rankled some in the region. One in particular, Osama bin Laden, began to build support for his organization, al-Qaeda, which was dedicated to the removal of the American military presence in the Middle East and to the toppling of Western-backed governments in Arab-speaking countries that he characterized as “apostate” regimes. Al-Qaeda’s policies and program were subsequently revealed by bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the assault on the USS Cole in the Yemen harbor in 2000, and the terrorist attacks on American soil on September 11, 2001.

Some American observers, who regretted the failure to topple Hussein in 1991, urged a second war with Iraq, especially after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The second war against Iraq began on March 20, 2003. Critics of both the first and second wars against Iraq have argued that, while they did play a part in the capture of Hussein in December 2003 and eventually the killing of Bin Laden by Navy SEALs in 2011, the prolonged military efforts in the country and the presence and then departure of American troops in the Persian Gulf region influenced the rise of other terrorist threats. The fall of Hussein in particular, some experts claim, created a struggle for power and government weakness that allowed terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which began violently taking over strategic territory in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2014 in an effort to establish a worldwide caliphate, to become even more dangerous threats. American troops did not pull out of Iraq, for the most part, until December 2011, and some have since returned in order to help Iraqi forces fight ISIS.

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