Operation Desert Storm Begins

Operation Desert Storm Begins

On January 16, 1991, the United States and allied forces began to move against Iraqi military positions in occupied Kuwait and the surrounding territory of southern Iraq. This was the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, one of the major military confrontations of the 1990s.

The events leading up to Operation Desert Storm go back to the 1980s, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein tried to take advantage of the revolutionary turmoil in neighboring Iran by attacking that country. Hussein thought that the disorganized Iranians would be an easy target for Iraqi territorial expansionism, but he was mistaken. After a long and expensive war, the conflict ended in a stalemate. In order to sustain his military effort, Hussein had imported large amounts of military equipment, driving his country deeply into debt. He had even borrowed money from neighboring Arab states, such as Kuwait on Iraq's southeastern border along the Persian Gulf, which were themselves afraid that Iranian revolutionary sentiment might spread to their conservative monarchies. Thus, during the Iraq-Iran War, Kuwait was in the ironic position of being on the Iraqi side.

After the war, Hussein struggled to reassert his authority, domestically and abroad. Iraq is an oil-producing and exporting country, but its oil reserves are limited, and thus it was unable to generate the funds necessary to pay off its foreign debts quickly. In 1990 Hussein began to pressure Kuwait for financial assistance, since Kuwait has sizable oil reserves of its own but only a small population and a weak military to defend its wealth. On July 17, 1990, Hussein accused Kuwait of excessive exploitation of the Rumailia oil field that straddles both Iraqi and Kuwaiti territory. April Glaspie, the American ambassador to Iraq, mistakenly informed Hussein that the United States was not interested in the issue, despite the ominous implications. On August 2, Hussein sent Iraqi forces into Kuwait and quickly occupied the country. He still commanded an impressive military machine, and was in an excellent position to expand into the lightly defended kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf oil-producing states, which would effectively make him the master of a considerable portion of the world's oil resources.

U.S. president George Bush had no significant military presence in the Persian Gulf to counter the Iraqi military threat. He initiated a series of international economic sanctions through the United Nations and began assembling an American expeditionary force that would eventually number in the hundreds of thousands. He also secured military and financial assistance from American allies throughout the world and from Arab states in the region that now came to consider Iraq the principal regional threat rather than Iran.

On November 29, 1990, the United Nations Security Council gave Iraq until January 15, 1991, to withdraw its forces from Kuwait and authorized the use of all necessary force by the United States and its allies to force Iraqi compliance. This measure, Security Council Resolution 678, was followed on January 12, 1991, by a resolution of the United States Congress authorizing the use of American troops against Iraq. The January 12 vote came after several months of fruitless negotiations and Iraqi stonewalling.

On January 16, 1991, the Bush administration announced that “the liberation of Kuwait has begun.” American military aircraft began thousands of bombing missions and missile attacks against Iraqi military targets. American military technology, such as infrared night vision and “stealth” radar-invisible planes, made the attacks devastatingly effective. The Iraqis attempted to retaliate with missile attacks of their own, launching SCUD missiles purchased from the Soviet Union many years before. Despite some limited successes, the missile attacks were ineffective in thwarting the overwhelming American onslaught. By February 23, 1991, Iraqi military bases, airfields, and other strategic sites were largely in ruins, and the American-led ground forces took the offensive.

Rather than attack the entrenched Iraqi positions in Kuwait directly, American commander general Norman Schwartzkopf conducted a sweeping end run around the Iraqi flank by going into the desert territory of southern Iraq and coming around the Iraqi forces in Kuwait from the side. Demoralized and disorganized, and frequently abandoned by their own officers who retreated for the safety of the Iraqi interior, Hussein's soldiers surrendered in droves. Some Iraqi units actually surrendered to television cameramen who had followed the ground forces into liberated Kuwait. The American victory was one of the most one-sided in the history of warfare. At every engagement, those Iraqi forces who chose to fight were crushed with few or no American or allied casualties, and most of Saddam Hussein's war machine was destroyed.

Rather than face the prospect of an American occupation of Iraq, Hussein quickly agreed to the terms of a United Nations cease-fire agreement. However, enforcement of the peace terms was problematic and a contentious issue for both the United States and the United Nations. Hussein, who stayed in power after the Gulf War ended, continued to thwart United Nations efforts to monitor illegal Iraqi development of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Thus, although Operation Desert Storm was successful in its objective of restoring the legitimate government of Kuwait, the collateral objective of defeating the territorial ambitions of Saddam Hussein was still unrealized.

The cease-fire took effect on April 11, 1991. Saddam Hussein wrote in his journal, “I led my country in confrontation by an aggression launched by thirty-three countries led by United States, which waged war against Iraq, the Iraqi's confrontation of which is called by Arabs and Iraqis as the Battle of Battles (Um Al-Ma'arik), where Iraq stood fast against the invasion, maintaining its sovereignty and political system.” The United States had decided not to occupy Baghdad because it was thought that allied forces would not support the move on the basis that removal of Hussein's government would cause the country to disintegrate into civil war. The success of the US campaign, in which only 148 US citizens were killed, caused President Bush to state that “a new world order has begun.”

Saddam Hussein proceeded to tighten his grip on Iraq after the war, crushing frequent uprisings of Shiites and Kurds. In 1993, Iraqi forces violated a UN no-fly zone, and the United States bombed Baghdad. In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which supported regime change in the country. More bombings occurred from 1998 to 2001, such as Operation Desert Fox, a result of intelligence claiming that Iraq was amassing weapons and conducting further incursions into no-fly zones.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the United States suspected Iraq of playing a part, and President Bush claimed that Iraq was part of an “Axis of Evil” with Iran and North Korea. However, there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any relations with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. With supposed intelligence that Iraq was amassing weapons of mass destruction, the United States again invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, with a coalition force, achieving control of the country by April 9. Hussein had escaped and eluded capture until December 13 of that year. On December 30, 2006, he was hanged after he was found guilty of crimes against humanity by the interim government of Iraq.