Causes and Impact of the Gulf War of 1991

This study will examine the causes of the Gulf War of 1991 and the impact the war had in the Gulf region and in the Arabic world. The causes or justification for the war can be found in part in the results which the victors claimed for themselves in the aftermath of the war. The essential cause was the invasion by Iraq of Kuwait, and the determination of the international community, via the United Nations, to free Kuwait. While numerous nations were involved in the attack on Iraq, the sources are unanimous in stating that the United States was the heart and soul of the war. Without American leadership, the war would likely not have taken place, or would have not ended as quickly or decisively as it did.

Added to this basic aim were the goals of crippling Iraq militarily so that it would not pose a danger to its neighbors in the Gulf and destroying its capacity to manufacture and use weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, the threat to the oil supply for the world from the Gulf also played a major role in the decision of the UN to engage Iraq militarily, but the most verbalized reason was the territorial integrity of Kuwait and the military threat of Iraq to the region.

The major nations involved in the war were Iraq, the United States (along with other nations representing the United Nations), Kuwait (at least insofar as it had been occupied by Iraq and its liberation was the major goal of the war), and Saudi Arabia, which served as the primary base of operations for

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and defeated Hussein's army on March 3 (Bennis and Moushabeck 55-56, 66). Clearly, the nation in the Gulf which experienced the greatest change of any country in the Gulf War was Iraq; On all counts Iraq had been devastated. With water lines destroyed and no fuel to boil polluted water from the Tigris River, sanitation systems destroyed and raw sewage flooding in many areas, meat costing $17/pound, rationing, electricity out in most places in the country, health conditions and survival were reaching breaking point (Bennis and Moushabeck 70). Iraq was in dire economic straits before the war, even before its invasion of Kuwait, in fact. As cited earlier, one of the reasons that Iraq invaded Kuwait in the first place was Iraq's crumbling economic situation. The war intensified that deterioration, which a report from the United Nations made clear on March 20, 1991, in its assessment of Iraq's post-war economic and industrial situation: Nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which had befallen the country. . . . Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy

Category: History - C