Gulf War

V

Land Phase of the Gulf War

On February 24 the coalition launched its long-anticipated land offensive. The focus of the attack was in south-western Iraq, where coalition forces first moved north, then turned east towards the Iraqi port of Basra. This manoeuvre surrounded Kuwait, encircling the Iraqi forces there and in southern Iraq, and allowed coalition forces (mainly Arab) to move up the coast and take Kuwait city. Some Iraqi units resisted, but the coalition offensive advanced more quickly than anticipated. Thousands of Iraqi troops surrendered. Others deserted. Iraq then focused its efforts on withdrawing its elite units and sabotaging Kuwaiti infrastructure and industry. Two days after the ground war had begun, Iraq announced it was leaving Kuwait. As the Iraqi troops withdrew, oil wells were set alight and substantial quantities of crude oil were intentionally released into the Persian Gulf, causing several years of severe environmental problems in the region.

On February 28, with the collapse of Iraqi resistance and the recapture of Kuwait—thereby fulfilling the coalition’s stated goals—the coalition declared a ceasefire. The land war had lasted precisely 100 hours. On March 2 the UN Security Council issued a resolution laying down the conditions for the ceasefire, which were accepted by Iraq in a meeting of military commanders on March 3. More extensive aims, such as overthrowing the Iraqi government or destroying Iraqi forces, did not have the support of all coalition members. Most Arab members, for example, believed the war was fought to restore one Arab country and not to destroy another. The United States was also concerned that extending the goal would involve their forces in endless fighting.

The Iraqis achieved none of their initial goals. Rather than enhancing their economic, military, and political position, they were economically devastated, militarily defeated, and politically isolated. Yet because the government and many of the military forces remained intact, the Iraqis could claim mere survival as a victory. The surviving military forces were used a short time later to suppress two post-war rebellions: one involving Shia Muslims in southern Iraq and one involving Kurds in the north.

Almost all of the casualties occurred on the Iraqi side. While estimates during the war had ranged from 10,000 to 100,000 Iraqis killed, Western military experts now agree that Iraq sustained between 20,000 and 35,000 casualties. The coalition losses were extremely light by comparison: 240 were killed, 148 of them were American and 24 were British (including 9 from a “friendly-fire” incident). The number of wounded totalled 776, of whom 458 were American and 10 British.

VI

Consequences of the Gulf War

The end of the fighting left some key issues unresolved, including UN sanctions against Iraq, which did not end with the war. On April 2, 1991, the Security Council laid out strict demands for ending the sanctions: Iraq would have to accept liability for damages, destroy its chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles, forego any nuclear weapons programmes, and accept international inspections to ensure these conditions were being met. If Iraq complied with these and other resolutions, the UN would discuss removing the sanctions. Iraq resisted, claiming that its withdrawal from Kuwait was sufficient compliance.

Many Western observers believed the victory was hollow because Saddam Hussein was still in power. At first, when Hussein was greatly weakened, Western powers believed a rebellion might succeed in overthrowing him. Meanwhile, potential rebels within Iraq believed they might receive international help if they rebelled. But when the Shia population of the marshland areas of southern Iraq rebelled shortly after the ceasefire, they were greeted not with international help but with Iraqi military forces returning from the southern front. It quickly became clear that the rebels would receive no international help, although several governments gave them verbal support. Under the terms of the ceasefire, which established “no-fly zones” in the north and south, Iraqis could not attack the Shias with aeroplanes, but could use helicopters, which they did to great effect. Spontaneous and loosely organized, the rebellion was crushed almost as quickly as it arose.

The defeat of the Shias made the debate over helping Iraqi rebels even more urgent. Ultimately, however, most Western governments decided that if the Iraqi government collapsed, the country might disintegrate, ushering in a new round of regional instability. Soon afterwards, Kurds in the north of the country rebelled, and they too received no help. The Kurds were able to withstand Hussein longer than the Shias, in part because they had a history of organized, armed resistance. In the end, though, the Kurds achieved only a very modest success: a UN-guaranteed haven in the extreme north of the country.

Elsewhere the effects of the war were less severe. In Kuwait the pre-war regime was restored, and in 1992 the emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, honoured his pledge in exile to reconvene the country’s parliament. Palestinians in Kuwait, a large expatriate community prior to the war, fared poorly after the war, in large part because Yasir Arafat and other prominent Palestinians had endorsed Hussein and his anti-Israeli rhetoric. Blamed for collaborating with the Iraqis, most of the Palestinian population (estimated at 400,000 before the war) was expelled from Kuwait or forbidden to return.

Following the war, thousands of American and British soldiers developed mild to debilitating health problems, including abdominal pain, diarrhoea, insomnia, short-term memory losses, rashes, headaches, blurred vision, and aching joints. The symptoms became known collectively as Gulf War syndrome but their cause was unknown. Speculation about the cause centred on exposure to chemical and biological weapons; experimental drugs given to troops to protect against chemical weapons; vaccinations against illness and disease; insecticides sprayed over troop-populated areas; and smoke from burning oil wells ignited by retreating Iraqis.

The UN continued to maintain most of the economic embargo on Iraq after the war, and several coalition countries enforced other sanctions, such as the no-fly zones. In 1995 the UN amended the sanctions to allow Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil for food and medicine if it also designated some of the revenue to pay for damages caused by the war; Iraq initially rejected this plan but then accepted it in 1996. The oil-for-food programme later became embroiled in controversy when it became clear that it encouraged flagrant corruption, undermining the sanctions regime that was already becoming internationally unpopular because of the suffering it was causing ordinary Iraqis. Following the Iraqi government’s failure to cooperate fully with UN arms inspectors, Operation Desert Fox in 1998 saw four days of bombing raids by US and British air forces against military targets, aimed at further eroding the Iraqi government’s nuclear and chemical weapons programmes. The unravelling of the sanctions regime, and intelligence fears over Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes, eventually led to the War on Iraq in 2003.