The end of the Cold War

For nearly two years after the UN-brokered cease-fire in the Persian Gulf, the governments of Iraq and Iran failed to initiate conversations toward a permanent peace treaty. Suddenly, in July 1990, the foreign ministers of the two states met in Geneva full of optimism about the prospects for peace. Why Saddam Hussein now seemed willing to liquidate his decade-long conflict with Iran and even give back the remaining land occupied at such cost by his armies began to become clear two weeks later, when he stunned the Arab world with a vitriolic speech in which he accused his small neighbor Kuwait of siphoning off crude oil from the Ar-Rumaylah oil fields straddling their border. He also accused the Persian Gulf states of conspiring to hold down oil prices, thereby damaging the interests of war-torn Iraq and catering to the wishes of the Western powers. The Iraqi foreign minister insisted that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the gulf emirates make partial compensation for these alleged “crimes” by cancelling $30,000,000,000 of Iraq’s foreign debt; meanwhile, 100,000 of Iraq’s best troops concentrated on the Kuwaiti border. In sum, a frustrated Hussein had turned his sights from giant Iran to the wealthy but vulnerable Arab kingdoms to the south.

Iraq’s brash and provocative demands alarmed the Arab states. President Hosnī Mubārak of Egypt initiated negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait in Saudi Arabia, hoping to pacify the situation without the intervention of the United States and other outside powers. Hussein, too, expected no interference from outside the region, but he made only the poorest show of accepting mediation. He broke off negotiations after just two hours and the next day, August 2, ordered his army to occupy Kuwait.

Hussein had risen to the position of leader of the Baʾth socialist party and military dictator of Iraq in a postcolonial environment of intrigue, paranoia, and genuine political threats. Iraq, situated in the Fertile Crescent of the ancient Babylonian emperors, was a populous and wealthy country torn by ethnic and religious divisions. Iraq’s boundaries, like those of all other states in the region, had been drawn up by British and French colonialists and either were arbitrary or conformed to their own interests rather than to the ethnic and economic needs of the region. In fact, the trackless deserts of the Middle East had never known stable national states, and Kuwait in particular struck Iraqis as an artificial state carved out of Iraq’s “natural” coastline—perhaps for the very purpose of preventing the Persian Gulf’s oil fields from falling under a single strong Arab state. In addition to coveting Kuwait’s wealth, Hussein hated its monarchical regime even as he accepted its billions in aid to support his own military establishment and war with Iran. Hussein rationalized his hatred for the gulf monarchies, the Iranian Shīʾites, and the Israelis in Arab nationalist terms. A disciple of Egypt’s Nasser, he saw himself as the revolutionary and military genius who would someday unify the Arabs and enable them to defy the West.

Hussein made the first in a series of fatal miscalculations, however, when he judged that his fellow Arabs would tolerate his seizure and despoliation of Kuwait rather than call upon outsiders for help. Instead, the government of Kuwait, now in exile, and the fearful King Fahd of Saudi Arabia looked at once to Washington and the United Nations for support. President Bush condemned Hussein’s act, as did the British and Soviet governments, and the UN Security Council immediately demanded that Iraq withdraw. Bush echoed the Carter Doctrine by declaring that the integrity of Saudi Arabia, now exposed to Iraqi invasion, was a vital American interest, and two-thirds of the 21 member states of the Arab League likewise condemned Iraq’s aggression. Within days the United States, the European Community, the Soviet Union, and Japan all imposed an embargo on Iraq, and the Security Council voted strict economic sanctions on Iraq (with Cuba and Yemen abstaining).

The same day King Fahd requested American military protection for his country. President Bush at once declared Operation Desert Shield and deployed the first of 200,000 American troops to the northern deserts of Saudi Arabia, augmented by British, French, and Saudi units and backed by naval and air forces. It was the largest American overseas operation since the Vietnam War, but its stated purpose was not to liberate Kuwait but to deter Iraq from attacking Saudi Arabia and seizing control of one-third of the world’s oil reserves. In President Bush’s words, the Allies had drawn a line in the sand.

Hussein was not impressed. On August 8 he formally annexed Kuwait, referring to it as Iraq’s “19th province,” an act the UN Security Council immediately condemned. Egypt offered to contribute troops to the Allied coalition, followed by 12 of the Arab League’s member states. Hussein responded by condemning those states as traitorous and proclaiming a jihad, or holy war, against the coalition—despite the fact that he and his government had never upheld the Muslim cause in the past. He tried to break the Arab alliance with the Western powers by offering to evacuate Kuwait in return for Israeli withdrawal from its occupied territories—despite the fact that he had never upheld the Palestinian cause either. When his efforts failed to weaken the coalition’s resolve, Hussein detained as hostages all foreigners caught in Kuwait and Iraq and moved to conclude permanent peace with Iran, thereby freeing his half-million-man army for battle.

Thus began the first post-Cold War world crisis. It can be described as such not only because it occurred after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in Europe and the dramatic moves toward East–West détente but also because of the characteristics of the crisis itself. The stakes in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait did not place Soviet and Western interests in direct conflict. Rather than falling into competition over how to handle the crisis, the United States and Soviet Union appeared in full agreement as the votes at the UN indicated. To be sure, a cutoff of oil exports from the Middle East would harm the Western states and perhaps even help the U.S.S.R. as the world’s largest oil producer, but Gorbachev was counting on large-scale economic aid from the West. If he opposed President Bush’s efforts to deal with the crisis, both the economic damage done to the West and the political hostility his opposition would arouse might end Gorbachev’s hopes for economic assistance. Bush, in turn, openly described the Persian Gulf crisis as a test case for the “new world order” he hoped to inaugurate in the wake of the Cold War: a test of the United Nations as a genuine force for peace and justice, and thus of Soviet–Western cooperation.