morable episode, apart from the original live from Baghdad reports of air raids, was General Normal Schwartzkopf's "mother of all briefings" after it ended. Four months of victory parades followed the four day ground war, and in the wake of victory, President George Bush's popularity ratings soared to unprecedented ninety percent approval levels.
Now, another five months has passed, and the war is already fading into the past. President Bush's popularity has plunged as the nation's attention shifts from triumphs abroad to economic troubles at home. The last fires in Kuwaiti oil fields have finally been put out. Saddam Hussein, though partly defanged, remains defiantly in power. It is possible, now, to begin to examine the Persian Gulf War in its historical context.
It is almost impossible to trace events in the Middle East back to their origins: the region's history is too long and complex. The earliest civilization on record, that of Sumeria, existed in what is now southern Iraq, and the biblical Garden of Eden may be based on ancient memories of the lands over which U.S. and Iraqi troops contended. This remote past is not without contemporary significance: in some of his propaganda art, Saddam Hussein is portrayed as an ancient Mesopotamian king in his chariot. The Crusades of the Middle Ages cast even a sharper shadow over the Persian Gulf War: much of the motivation for the assemblage of a "coalition" that would include at least nominal participation by a number of Arab Muslim powers was to avoid the appearance of Western Christian armies making war on their own in the heartland of Islam.
Even the more immediate origins of the war go far back in the twentieth century. Kuwait, nominally part of the Ottoman Empire (along with Iraq), was effectively an independent city state since the eighteenth century. But its territory extended, practically speaking, only as far as the gates in the city's mud br...