I’ve had extreme troubles finding staight answers to this question. I would appriciate anyone’s help.
People will give a lot of reasons, and suspect various plots and nefarious motives. The reasons I have heard:
1.) Saddam Hussein invaded our allies in Kuwait, and needed to be thrown out/taught a lesson.
2.) Iraq was poised to strike at the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and was thus close to controlling a large portion of Middle Eastern Oil.
3.) Saddam Hussein was very close to developing and deploying atomic bombs.
4.) The invading Iraqis had committed atrocities in Kuwait.
It turned out that some of the things listed in #4 were not really true. It’s like stories about German atrocities during World War I – while horrible things WERE done, the specific charges turned out to be false.
The Iraqis claimed that the Kuwaitis were drilling at an angle so as to tap into the oil fields that were really the property of Iraq. Furthermore, Iraq has an incredibly small coastline, for all its size, and what it has is apparently pretty swampy. They’ve wanted better ports for a long time. They are also convinced that the British division of territories that resulted in the creation of Kuwait is colonialist and arbitrary, with no historical basis, and that Kuwait is properly part of Iraq. Just before the invasion, the Iraqi diplomat believed that he had gotten an indication from the U.S. diplomat that the US would not interfere in an invasion of Kuwait (something that seems very hard to believe, but if that is what you wish to believe, you could convince yourself).
After the invasion a lot of folks wanted to use sanctions against Iraq to force them out – Colin Powell was in this group. In retrospect, I don’t think it would have worked. Sanctions haven’t done much over the past decade.
When you come down to it, the war was about control of Middle Eastern oil and the power that comes with that. It’s easy to argue that the war was about keeping the price of gas at the pump low, but that’s a truly gross oversimplification. Petroleum is Power, in many more ways than one. It provides car fuel and jet fuel and energy for electricity generation, and petrochemicals for plastics and other applications. Controlling it allows you to grant power to those who purchase it from you, as well. The war was about cheap gas only in the sense that cheap gas is a subset – and the most visible one – of the Power being fought over.
I suspect the war was also as much about drawing lines “in the sand”. The US didn’t care about Iran and Iraq fighting each other, but when Iraq invaded Kuwait it directly threatened US interests, and a clear message had to be sent that it was NOT OK to invade Kuwait or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Oman or Qatar.
Finally, there was the issue of Hussain’s war-making capability – nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, not to mention the SCUD delivery system. I suspect they were glad for a legitimate reason to bring this down. I admit the idea of Saddam with nukes scares me.
Why didn’t they “finish the job” and get rid of Hussain? I suspect that the real reason, despite the rhetoric, is that if the US DID get rid of him , there was no politically acceptable solution as to what to replace him with, and the desire to avoid an occupation period. So they left it up to the Iraqis to sort out for themselves. They don’t seem to have supported any sort of coup, however, and Hussain is still in power.
The short answer is…oil.
Sure there are questions about the stability of the region, the morality of helping those in need etc. but it all comes down to liberating an oil producing country from an unfriendly nation.
This may strike some as morally wrong when there are many other regional conflicts that could be stepped into in a similar role. However it was more in the nation’s interest to intervene when a major oil exporter is at risk.
It is the government’s job to protect the vital interests of its populace. As flawed as the energy policy of the USA may be, we do depend on imported oil. Any cessation of the flow (or the potential for political blackmail by the threat to cut it off) would hurt the economy of the US. Hence the Gulf War.
Of course looking back one could argue that the group that benefited the most (aside from Kuwait) was CNN. Maybe it was just a Ted Turner Plot.
Excellent post CalMeacham
I got the idea that Schwarzkopf was really defensive when first asked about this. He was careful to make the point that there was nothing between the allied forces and Baghdad. The stock answer he gave was along the lines of “our job was only to liberate Kuwait.”
For an excellent fiction treatment of the Gulf War I recommend Frederick Forsyth’s The Fist of God.
Oil.
I agree. Hussein was pretty up front about his motivations: oil revenue and the military/political power it would bring him. If we had replaced Hussein with some opressed freedom fighter, the guy would have turned on us in a year or two. Nodody wanted another Khomeni(sp?) to throw the region into another Dark ages.
CalMeacham, that was the best explanation of Desert Storm I’ve ever read. Darn good job.
Nice one Cal! Stormin’ Norman and the boys in DC were at BIG odds over the timing of the cease fire (exactly 100 hours, but the historians have overlooked that). He and Colin did NOT see eye to eye. We left Iraq hanging onto some serious firepower after that ceasefire. We were getting incoming rounds (arty and sniper) after we were told not to shoot, and we watched major rolling steel go north back into Iraq out of Kuwait. The Republican Guard was not destroyed. The U.S. Army (I am a Marine) could have been on top of Baghdad in hours if given half a chance. Given another 24 hours of assaults would have inflicted VERY serious damage on Iraq’s warfighting ability. But the OP was about STARTING it, not STOPPING it. Strategic assets (oil) and defense agreements (Saudi Arabia).
You would not BELIEVE the military bases that were prepositioned and unmanned, waiting for someone (Uncle Sam?) to fall in on. Funny? Hilarious!
Saudi could never stop Iraq if they rolled on in. Yes, I believe Kuwait was slant drilling. Yes, the Brits made MAJOR league problems when they divvied things up willy nilly (can you say Arab-Israeli Conflict?). And the industrial world would suffer greatly if the Arabian Peninsula came under the control of a freak-a-zoid like Saddam Hussein (I love it how Bush Sr. always said “SA-dam” instead of “sa-DAHM”. That is a great insult.
I don’t have anything to add except, “Great post Cal.” I can’t add or disagree with a single piece of that synopsis.
This statement alone is impressive. I firmly believe we never had any intention of snuffing Saddam out, even while the war was raging on. We’d be screwed if we did.
What amazes me is that it hasn’t been explored as a reason why he’s still in control now. People seem to believe we tried to get him, but missed. I hope what I’ve suspected comes to light sometime down the road- We didn’t want to put ourselves in a position that we’d have to insert a government that we liked. None of them in that region would have worked at that time.
Geez, I was going to answer, but CalMeacham’s post covered it!
Hussein was also extremely likely to have attacked Israel, which would have led to a nuclear exchange fairly quickly.
I think Bush Sr. literally prevented World War III in Desert Storm.
The modern world runs on oil. The people chanting “No blood for oil” were missing the point, which is that, for the twenty-first century, it’s the same thing.
Regards,
Shodan
Damn!
Thanks for the kind words. I felt sure that I was gonna get crucified as soon as hit the “Submit Reply” key.
CalMeacham, there is another very fundamental reason why the job was not “finished”. The US was not acting alone, it was part of a coalition acting under a UN mandate which only gave authority to liberate Kuwait. Had the US decided to continue, the coalition, which included Arab countries and was already quite shaky, would have dissolved instantly leaving the US not only to “finish” the job in Iraq, which would have been the easy part, but to confront the UN and the rest of the world as a bully. The US did a very wise thing as this preserved their legal authority under the UN mandate. Do not forget that even many countries which were nominally part of the coalition had a tremendous anti-US popular sentiment in their own population. Keeping that coalition together was a feat in diplomacy.
O.K. Cal, if you want a bit of disagreement-
I don’t think that’s so hard to believe. Think about it- Saddam is becoming a big-time player in the Persian Gulf arena. He’s accumulating any number of mass destruction weapons, including the development of a nuclear weapon. How better to get in there and destroy this guy then to give him the green light to invade, in secret, no less. Then, after he does what we quietly approved, we pounce on him and say we never said anything of the sorts. At that point, Saddam is stuck. He can’t say, “Well, we thought they said O.K., I guess I was wrong. Let’s bow down to the Great Satan and retreat. So sorry.”
No, he can’t at that point. He’d lose any ounce of credibility he thought he had in the Arab world. He had to stay and fight a losing battle.
If you ask me, I think we invited him to do it so we could turn around and try and bomb him back into the dark ages and blame it all on him.
I mean, I haven’t heard a peep from the ambassador that was privy to those talks before the invasion say a thing since then. From the reports that I’ve heard, that ambassador has been strangely tight lipped about it all ever since.
Just a thought…
CnoteChris, I do not believe for a minute that the US deliberately misled Saddam so they could then pounce on him. I believe this has been clarified quite well and what happened was more of a misunderstanding than anything else. I remember reading about this but I do not remember the details. I do remember some high level US person admitting their diplomat (I believe it was a woman) did a poor job which may have led the Iraqis to believe they were free to act but this was never stated the US position nor was it explicitly stated. It seems this woman was in over her head and was not really aware of the implications of what was transpiring. Maybe someone will remember better details.
On the other hand, it can be argued that the war might have been avoided if the US had been more firm and clear that it would not tolerate the invasion of Kuwait.
We fought Desert Storm so we wouldn’t have to pay $2.00 a gallon for gas!
Hey, wait a minute…
There’s more to the situation: Iraq is useful as a counterpoint to Iran. The Middle East is horribly complex. There are no easy answers there.
I remember at the time the discussion coming up about the coalition forces continuing into Baghdad. The bottom line is that they did not have the approval of the Saudis or anyone else, and the coalition would have rapidly fallen apart. There would have been serious repercussions towards the U.S. had they not stopped when they did.
Iraq did attack Israel. They lobbed quite a few Scuds at Tel Aviv. This was a smart move by Hussein.
If the Israelis had joined in the air war, which they were very close to doing, the whole shakey coalition would have unravelled in about two seconds. It took some pretty major diplomacy by the State Department to keep them from trying to take out the Scud launchers themselves. Whether they would have been any more successful than the other air forces is questionable.
Sorry, chaps but I’m going to offer up an alternative non-American perspective:
IMHn-AO (and putting this in a wider context), one might argue with some certainty that a central plank of post WW2 US foreign policy has been to create division and discord within the Arab world – if the Arabs are looking over their shoulder at each other Israel is more secure.
It’s been a difficult game to play but at long as ‘we’ supplied the factions / countries with their arms / tech / on going supplies, there was a reasonable degree of control over what Arab country’s could do against each other and, through that mechanism, the oil fields were relatively safe – and Israel safer. It also meant that those countries were reliant on ‘us’ for their own defence (against other Arab countries) This, in turn, also levered a greater degree of control over their attitudes towards Israel.
Of course, for a considerable period, the USSR was a fly in the ointment but not – at least in a Communist sense – by the time the Gulf War kicked off.
I suspect the CYA couldn’t have asked for anything more than Saddam and all their Christmas’s came at once when he went to war with Iran (it would have been very annoying to have supplied both sides with all that hardware and not got a bang). He did, and does, fulfil a major function on behalf of the US.
Misreading the actual invasion of Kuwait - rather that the threat of invasion, which we could live with. Just. - was, of course, a serious misjudgement by us. However, in not carrying on to Baghdad - while seriously reducing Saddam’s capabilities and, then, by deserting the Marsh Arabs and others (encouraging them first, then leaving them hanging) - the acceptable status quo was restored. Saddam remained in power, relatively safe and also much diminished.
In addition, Saddam filled a vital role at a time when the US arnaments industry was running out of regime’s to demonise. China was too backward for even the US media to work with, Gaddafi, N.Korea, etc. weren’t really up to the job… Saddam filled the void until China looked a more plausible threat.
Policy (the trick) is to keep him agitating - creating discord and uncertainty - while also keeping him on a relatively tight leash: Scuds landing in Israel is not acceptable, nor is chemical warfare but, short of that, he’s doing his job. And goodness knows how many satellites and AWAC’s keep track of what he’s doing both personally and with his military, just to make sure he’s behaving within those bounds.
So IMHn-AO, Saddam remains Langley’s number one operative: The neighbourhood growler who salivates and barks at anyone passing and snapping on a tight leash. He makes people nervous, the Arabs don’t present a wholly unified front, they buy weaponry and Israel is a little more secure.
And just to counter one additional view:
The ‘Coalition’ was real in one vital sense, (that being) that it allowed those with the most vested in achieving the desired result to engender and maintain popular public opinion in the cause – hey ! everyone’s in on this party. To my mind the whole Gulf War enterprise appeared to be characterised as some kind of moral crusade to which the ‘Coalition’ was the most vital ingredient in maintaining popular public support. It read well in the media.
The actual ground fighting was predominately a US, British and French effort with token efforts from others – if those three wanted to continue on to Baghdad, no one was going to stop them / us.
Militarily that is SO true, but would have been suicide for international relations in the the Arab world, garnering sympathy for Hussein and causing major financial strain on the West.
That’s one big misunderstanding sailor. One that I find hard to believe could happen in this day and age.
But it’s not like I know what I’m talking about, I’m just speculating here. In my opinion, the idea that we would want to provoke him into a war that he’d lose, especially back then, seems plausable. Especially given the fact that Israel was interested in getting in there and ousting the guy themselves. Had that happened, all hell would have broken out in that region.