Humiliated in the eyes of many Iraqis by his failure to defeat Iran, and with the impoverished Iraqi state unable to contemplate flooding an already near-non-existent job market with hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers, Saddam sought to shift the blame for his country’s precarious condition onto the Arab nations that had supported Iraq during its war with Iran - Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.Įven in the face of such an extraordinary betrayal, the Gulf states worked to find a peaceful solution to the crisis, but Saddam was hellbent on bloodletting. He was dissuaded only when Britain rapidly dispatched 3,000 troops to protect it.īut Saddam’s motivation for launching such a risky land grab was rooted less in historical precedent than in bitterness, desperation and self-delusion. Qasim argued that as Kuwait had been part of the Ottoman vilayet of Basra, which was now in modern-day Iraq, Kuwait was “an integral part” of Iraq. In 1961, one week after Kuwait gained its independence after 62 years as a British protectorate, Iraq’s President Abd Al-Karim Qasim, who had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, threatened to invade. It was not the first time in living memory that an Iraqi leader had tried to annex the small country. Having failed in his declared ambition to annex Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan Province, the dictator now intended to make Kuwait the 19th province of Iraq. In 1988, not for a moment did any rational observer foresee what came next. Another war would surely be the very last thing that Saddam would contemplate after the carnage of the past eight years, and yet he invaded his small southern neighbor, Kuwait, triggering the First Gulf War and the calamitous chain of events that would follow it. By some estimates, as many as 500,000 on both sides had died in the fighting, and Iraq, formerly an oil-rich country, had been transformed into a nation on its financial knees. It was certainly shorter than the Iraq-Iran War, a brutal eight-year conflict that finally came to an end on Aug. 28, 1991, after a 42-day aerial bombardment followed by a ground assault by a US-led coalition that lasted just 100 hours.Īs wars go, it was a short one - Saddam’s aggression was met by an overwhelming display of force by a US-led coalition of nations, including the Gulf states, outraged by the dictator’s murderous adventurism. 2, 1990, when Saddam invaded and occupied his small southern neighbor, Kuwait. Perhaps most traumatic for Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states threatened by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the sundering of the brotherly bonds that, until that moment, had meant that the prospect of one Arab state turning on another was unthinkable.
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