ick walls. The border of Kuwait as its exists now, the border which Saddam Hussein demanded be changed, and which he eventually resolved to change by force, was imposed by the British in the course of the settlements they and the French made throughout the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I (Fromkin, 1989: 560). While it is difficult, thus, to find any justifiable Iraqi claim to the city of Kuwait, there was some significant justice behind Iraqi complaints regarding the borders, arbitrary lines in the desert, within which it was confined.
An earlier border dispute, and Saddam's decision to resolve it by force, was the more immediate background cause of the Persian Gulf War. In 1979, Saddam took advantage of the internal chaos of Ayatollah's Khomeini's Iranian revolution to invade Iran across the Shatt al'Arab river at the head of the Gulf, not far from Kuwait. Instead of ending in a swift Iraqi victory, the war turned into a bloody stalemate reminiscent in many ways of World War I.
All the Arab Gulf states feared Ir
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