Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and this event led to the first major United Nations (UN) military campaign since the Korean War of the early 1950s. Although the UN Security Council unanimously, and within hours of the invasion, passed Resolution No. 660, calling for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces, it was not until November that it authorized, in Resolution No. 678, the multinational force, which had by then been largely assembled (as allowed in Article 51 of the UN Charter), to use ‘all necessary means’ to liberate Kuwait and to restore peace to the region. Meanwhile, within days of the original military reaction, the USA dispatched a light force to defend Saudi Arabia, which was feared to be under threat of invasion by Iraqi troops stationed on the Kuwaiti border, at the request of the Saudi government. Pressure from Western members of the UN Security Council led to the swift imposition of economic sanctions involving an international embargo on all trade with Iraq (thus forcing the suspension of Iraq’s economic lifeline, its oil exports), except for medical and humanitarian relief supplies.
There were several politically sensitive issues with which the UN-sponsored allied powers had to contend. The USA, which was always the clear leader of the campaign to liberate Kuwait, was anxious to broaden the basis of the coalition so that Iraq could not present itself as a Third World power being bullied by the capitalist West. This was extremely successful, because several Arab nations, most importantly Egypt and Syria (which did not even have diplomatic relations with the USA at the time), joined up, as did some, but not all, NATO members. During the autumn and early winter the allied nations built up their forces in Saudi Arabia, especially the USA which committed 430,000 ground troops, 1,300 fighter and support aircraft, 2,000 tanks and 55 warships. (The British contribution, though much smaller in absolute numbers, represented 50% of the armoured and air assets of the British Army of the Rhine.) Although the then Soviet Union was not prepared to dispatch forces, it was generally supportive of the Western members in the Security Council, and certainly made it clear that this Middle East crisis was not going to become a cold war issue. It took some time for the USA and other allies to persuade the Security Council to move from sanctions to an outright ultimatum, and to authorize the use of force. At the end of November they finally agreed unanimously to authorize the use of military force if Iraq failed to withdraw completely from Kuwait, and to agree to the payment of compensation to Kuwait, by 15 January 1991.
There was also a domestic political battle for the US president, George Bush, in persuading an increasingly isolationist USA to allow him to fight. Although those opposed invoked the fears of another Vietnam War, and there was much criticism in the Senate, ultimately he gained the necessary authority.
As the ultimatum drew near there was considerable scepticism as to whether the US-led coalition forces would, or even could, take effective military action. Much was made of the apparent size and technical competence of the Iraqi forces, particularly the Revolutionary Guard. Iraq had, after all, fought the Iran–Iraq War to a standstill over eight years of battles as bloody as anything since the First World War. It was doubted by many, most importantly by the Iraqis, that the West really had the courage to go to war. (Bush’s problems in persuading the American electorate to let him wage war contributed to Iraq’s fatal misperception on this matter.)
When war came, suddenly and within hours of the ultimatum deadline, it must have been obvious immediately to the Iraqis that they had made a serious mistake about the nature of the allied war plans. The allies, mainly the USA, but with significant help from the UK, launched the biggest strategic air bombardment ever seen, without putting a single ground soldier at risk. For nearly a month military and civilian infrastructure targets were systematically destroyed with the loss of only a handful of allied air force personnel. Superior allied technology rendered Iraqi targets almost defenceless. Meanwhile Iraq retaliated with numerous Scud missile attacks into Saudi Arabia and, in a futile attempt to sway Arab support for the allies, Israel. There was much speculation over Iraq’s capability and intention to arm these missiles with chemical, or even nuclear, warheads, but in the event all the missiles were conventionally armed. The morale and fighting capacity of the Iraqi army was so destroyed that when the inevitable counter invasion, the ‘land war’, started it lasted only 100 hours, during which much of the Iraqi ground forces were destroyed, captured, surrendered or driven back over their own border. True to the terms of the UN mandate, the allies, on Bush’s insistence, refused to invade Iraq itself to complete the destruction of Iraqi military power, a decision which later came to be questioned when the regime of Saddam Hussain survived. The real aim of the USA, and probably the British, had always been transparent—to destroy Iraq’s war-making capacity, and to terminate the dictatorship of Saddam Hussain. These unofficial war aims were not accomplished. Much of the Iraqi army survived by fleeing, or troops had never been committed in the first place, and Hussain easily put down rebellions against him by Shi‘ite Muslims in the south of Iraq and by Kurds in the north. The UN appeared to be unable to force Hussein to dismantle entirely his nuclear weapons programme, and Iraq almost certainly remained a serious potential threat to stability in the Middle East. In this latter sense it was a massive affirmation that, with the cold war over, the UN really could be a powerful agent for peace, and that aggressive military force could be stopped by collective action. Nonetheless by the beginning of the 21st century Saddam Hussain was regarded as one of the great enemies of the USA, and President George W. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ seemed likely to escalate into renewed Western involvement with Iraq.
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