Back in 1990, Iraq was making claims against both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Then they invaded and occupied Kuwait.
My personal opinion is that Saddam’s claims and threats against Saudi Arabia were mostly for diplomatic purposes. Iraq felt it had a reasonable chance of having its occupation of Kuwait recognized so it was raising the issue of Saudi Arabia as a bargaining chip - something it could concede as the price of agreeing to “only” claim Kuwait. Obviosuly their diplomatic strategy didn’t work.
But suppose Iraq had decided to pursue a more active plan. Suppose they had invaded both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1990.
I think they would have succeeded initially. Saudi Arabia is bigger and better armed than Kuwait but Iraq was significantly stronger. At the very least, they could have taken Riyadh and the oil fields in the eastern part of the country. But let’s assume they occupied the whole country.
How would it have played out from there? I’m thinking that most of the smaller gulf states, like Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, the UAE, and Yemen would have fallen in line. Jordan would probably do the same. These countries wouldn’t be happy about an expansionist Iraq but they wouldn’t want to step forward and offer themselves as the next battleground.
So where would a coalition counterattack base itself out of? An amphibious assault from Egypt across the Red Sea? Syria and Iran were not friendly to Iraq but they also wouldn’t have wanted a large American force based in their country. So Turkey would have become the main staging area.
The downside of that is Turkey’s on the wrong end of Iraq. It’s not going to work as a staging area for a limited war to liberate Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. An attack from Turkey is going to go into Iraq itself.
An invasion of Saudi Arabia would have destablized the entire region. It would have made the entire Middle East up for grabs by half a dozen different powers. About the only thing Iraq could be sure of in such a situation was that it could NOT hold the entire Arabian peninsula against every comer. The very fact that so many nations in the region accepted the US into an alliance against the occupation of Kuwait shows just how much no one wanted to risk the status quo.
Iraqi forces did mount a limited invasion and brief occupation of the Saudi city of Khafji, just over the Kuwaiti border. Though obviously this wasn’t a full-blown invasion and the Iraqis were beaten back fairly quickly.
If Saudi Arabia had also been conquered by Iraq, then as the OP suggested, the most obvious bases for any US counter-attack would be Turkey and Egypt, though Syria might also have been a possibility given that they made a token military contribution to the coalition. Not to mention a possible amphibious invasion of Kuwait by US Marines.
Saudi Arabia is a pretty damned big country and has nearly as many people as Iraq does. I seriously doubt Saddam would have been able to roll up the entire country before U.S. and other allied troops began landing in the parts he didn’t hold yet. Moving into the immediately adjacent areas would have complicated the U.S. position in terms of staging areas, and would have put a lot of really important oilfields under Iraqi control or at least under pretty direct military threat, making life even more interesting than it already was for George H.W. Bush and company. On the other hand, such a(n even more) blatant display of naked aggression, coupled with the obviously over the top threat to the world’s oil supply, would likely have caused an even more united response from the rest of the world than Saddam actually wound up facing. (Including perhaps a willingness to go ahead and march all the way to Baghdad in '91; direct Soviet and even Chinese involvement rather than benign neutrality; etc.)
It would have meant Hussein invading a vast amount of ground in a short amount of time an certainly calling down the ire of the United States. Hussein did not expect that the US would do anything about Kuwait, and was gravely mistaken. Had he rushed into Saudi Arabia there would have either been a collapse as in Kuwait, or enough time to fight back, in which case the extreme weakness of Hussein’s forces against the well trained and equiped Saudi war machine would have exposed Hussein as a paper tiger while losing very little land.
Now I don’t think that Hussein knew that he was a paper tiger. But he probably did know that he was not mobile over hundreds of miles of desert. He could have expected to take border towns, but mobilize SA and Iran and Turkey and NATO against him.
Had he not invaded Kuwait, with the tacit permission of Ambassador Glaspie of the USA, he would probably still be in power today and an ally.
I know almost nothing about the recent military history of the Middle East but the other day I was looking at worldwide defense budgets. According to Wikipedia, in 2009 Saudi Arabia were the 8th biggest spender in the world. I just googled “saudi arabia defense spending” and found a this google public data graph showing that Saudi Arabia have been spending a relatively large proportion of their GDP on defense: 8-15%. I presume you can buy some scary stuff with that kind of oil money.
Well, if Iraq was going to be serious about it, I can imagine them cultivating some Saudi collaboration first, maybe promising one of the lesser princes a shot at the throne if he’ll stage an internal coup on the eve of the attack.
They’re spending a lot now. But their big defense budgets came after 1990 as a response to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. In 1990 they were still pretty weak. The Iraqi army was numerically bigger, better trained, and had a core of combat veterans from its war with Iran (1980-1988). I think it’s a reasonable possibility to say that Iraq could have overrun Saudi Arabia.
Taking over the whole country, including Mecca and Medina? There are few things that could trigger the “war against Islam” that everyone likes to talk about, but that would be one of them. Which would not go well for Iraq, given that both it and most of its neighbors are mostly Muslim.
They might have been able to take a few nearby towns and shift the border a bit, but even that would run the risk of putting them on the wrong side of a holy war.
If we occupied Mecca and Medina, it would cause a holy war. But Iraq is a Muslim country. So it wouldn’t be an act of sacrilege for them to control the Holy Cities. Muslims didn’t object when the Turks had controlled Mecca and Medina.
Iraq could even have spun this to their advantage. They could have claimed they were liberating the Holy Cities from Saudi political interference and making Mecca and Medina open to all Muslims. (The Saudis restrict some Islamic sects from visitng Mecca.)
Iraq didn’t have the logistics to support an invasion of Saudi Arabia…which is why they didn’t do it. They were strapped just invading Kuwait. Had they tried simultaneously to invade both they would have failed in both. Had they tried to invade just SA and left Kuwait alone, they would have failed, though probably they would have managed to drive a couple hundred miles into SA and do a lot of damage first. In the end, however, they would have failed and their drive would have fallen apart, even if the US didn’t lift a finger (which we would have…as soon as Iraqi armored columns crossed the border into SA and started driving in, they would have been continually under air attack by the US, not to mention SA…it would have been very ugly for the Iraqi’s in short order).
It all boils down to logistics…and the Iraqi’s simply didn’t have it. They could have, perhaps, built up logistics along the border and then launched their attacks, but that would have been pretty obvious, and those logistics would have been VERY vulnerable to attack and extremely difficult for them to defend.
Remember, that as powerful as the US was, and as weak as the Iraqi’s were during the second Gulf War, they ALMOST succeeded in cutting our own logistics at one point during the initial invasion…and had they done so it would have been big trouble for the US troops driving into Iraq. I doubt it would have stopped us, at least in the long run, but it could have hurt us, and certainly would have delayed us. For the Iraqi’s, delay wouldn’t have helped all that much, but turn it around and think about what that would do to an Iraqi attacking force driving into a large country like SA. Nightmare pretty much sums it up.
I think they could have driven in, oh, say as far as a T-72 could go on a tank or two of fuel. Say a couple hundred kilometers. Even unopposed, I think that would have pretty much been the limit of what they were capable. Take Riyadh? Not a chance in hell. The oil fields? They might have damaged them, but taken? Again, I’m not seeing any way they could do that, even if they focused everything they had on Saudi Arabia and left Kuwait completely alone. I don’t believe that the Iraqi army pre-GW I could have driven unopposed from Iraq to Riyadh and the oil fields, let alone under fire and with vulnerable logistics and re-supply under attack.
Agreed, but if Saddam had intended to invade Saudi, he could have prepared the logistics and successfully invaded and conquered the peninsula. Not that it would have done him much good: we’d still have kicked his arse, though we might have had to establish a beachhead first.
From my readings, when the US opposed the Kuwait invasion and sent troops into Saudi Arabia the US had put itself in a very precarious position. The logistical support for those troops didn’t exist and they were pretty much sitting ducks. If Saddam had invaded at that time he could have caused mass casualties of American troops. That doesn’t mean the invasion would have succeeded in the long run. If there had been 20K Americans killed all hell would have reigned down on Iraq. Yet, Saddam could have done it because those troops weren’t sufficiently protected. Thankfully for the 20K US troops in that position, Saddam showed some restraint knowing that he couldn’t win the end game.
Of course, we are playing “if”. Wars don’t happen overnight. They have to be planned. It took months for the US to react to the invasion of Kuwait. The logistics of battle had to be put in place in order to put the troops into battle.
There was no way that Iraq could have won the first Gulf War. Their calculation from the outset was that the Western coalition wouldn’t respond. Yet they did. Bad bet. Nonetheless, Saddam stayed in power and was allowed to put down the Kurds because GHWB realized that occupying Iraq was a losing proposition. Something his son and his advisers didn’t have the intellectual capacity to grasp.
Reading Kenneth Pollack’s Arabs at War: Arab Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991, I can’t see an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia as working at all. A military action of that sort is simply beyond their ability to maintain operational control. Iraq did best in defense or in carefully orchestrated and rehearsed attacks, and even then would fall apart fairly quickly. The only factor in their favor is that the Saudi army is even worse.
But the Saudi air force is and was substantially better, which would have made a difference in concert with American air power ( 48 air force F-15’s were in Saudi Arabia and two carriers were deployed to the Gulf within six days of the invasion of Kuwait ) and would have greatly hindered any Iraqi advance.
Think about what you are saying here while looking at a map of Southern Iraq along the border of Saudi Arabia. There is no way they could have built up a large enough stockpile of supplies to support a large field army (even assuming they had the transport to move with the army after the invasion started, which I seriously doubt they did) without it being noticed. It took the US months to prepare for the invasion of Iraq, after all. Such supplies would have been far away from anything resembling air defense in Iraq (unlike our own supply dumps which were essentially invulnerable to whatever the Iraqi’s could do to during the first or second GW). Even if they spread them out, it would have been obvious where they were…and this leaves aside how vulnerable the supply convoys would have been even if they could have somehow defended the supply dumps themselves.
I don’t see any way at all Iraq could have launched such an attack and succeeded, even without the US involved. The Saudis would have traded space for time, fallen back, and then slashed the Iraqi armored spear heads off from resupply and basically destroyed them without even having to engage them directly. WITH the US in support (simply a US carrier group would have been enough), there isn’t a snowballs chance in hell of the Iraqi’s getting more than a couple hundred kilometers in (if that) before being wiped out.
The initial American troops were sent in to Saudi Arabia as part of Desert Shield - their role was essentially to deter an Iraqi invasion by raising the stakes.
But if the Iraqis had already invaded, deterence was no longer an option. In such a case, I think we would have held off on sending in troops. Bush wouldn’t have wanted to risk sending in American forces that might be vulnerable. We would have waited until more forces could be gathered and deployed.