On August 2, 1990, the Iraqi forces of President Saddam Hussein invaded and swiftly occupied the neighboring emirate or principality of Kuwait. The optimistic hope that the largely bloodless Eastern European democratic revolutions of 1989 marked an "end of history" and the beginning of a new era of peace and democracy was quite brutally dashed. By invading Kuwait, Saddam was challenging the world. He was in effect asserting that in spite of lofty rhetoric about the rule of law, naked force could still have the final word.
Saddam was asserting this principle, the principle of force, quite apart from any question about the rights or wrongs of his previous diplomatic dispute with Kuwait. It may well be that Iraq had some merit in its claims that were the immediate pretext for the war: Iraqi rights to a waterway into the Persian Gulf, alleged excessive Kuwaiti oil extraction from the Rumaila oil field which underlies both countries, and violation of its OPEC production quotas. There might, indeed, well be merit (or might not be) to the Iraqi protest that the Kuwaitis had not negotiated in good faith about these issues.
By deciding to resolve its grievances by armed force, indeed the invasion, occupation, and annexation of Kuwait, Saddam and the Iraqis put all these questions to the side. They resorted to force of a particularly unambiguous sort, on an equally unambiguous scale, to settle their disputes with Kuwait, by simply putting an end to Kuwait. By Saddam's own proclamations, Kuwait as such no longer existed, now being no more than "Province 19" of Iraq.
"Kuwait as such" was a legal entity, in some sense an abstraction. Reports out of Kuwait swiftly put the consequences of invasion in a human context. The reports were of murder and brutality: arbitrary arrests, torture, execution of children on their parents' doorsteps, rape, systematic and large scale looting. Western civilians in Kuwait and...