Disastrous consequences of Kuwait invasion, US-led wars

Twenty-five years ago Iraq invaded Kuwait following a dispute over Kuwait’s refusal to curb oil exports to raise the price to $20 a barrel and allegations that the emirate was slant drilling into Iraq’s Rumaila oil field. Kuwait also demanded repayment of loans that had enabled bankrupt Baghdad to fight Iran during an eight-year war.

The Iraqi invasion and occupation of the emirate, gave lacklustre US President George H.W. “Papa” Bush just the opportunity he wanted: a war to prove himself a great leader. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which Bush had previously headed, obliged him by falsely reporting that Iraq was also massing troops on the Saudi border to attack the kingdom. Bush dispatched tens of thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia and massed half a million within six months.

King Hussein, the leading Arab opponent of war, made a valiant effort to mediate a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Other world figures, including the Pope and Yasser Arafat, also tried but failed.

Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s president at the time, offered to withdraw from Kuwait if Israel pulled out of the Arab territories it had occupied in 1967 — a proposal anyone in his right mind would have accepted. Such a deal would have ended Israeli colonisation of Palestinian territory before this effort had destroyed the “two-state solution” and, with any luck, brought about the creation of the Palestinian state the international community has mandated. But this was not acceptable to Papa Bush who was determined to wage and win a war that could ensure his re-election in 1992. He knew, of course, that he could have hardly expected to win the election if he pressed Israel into pulling out and understood that by waging a war against Iraq he would secure the support of the influential pro-Israeli lobby and its backers.

Papa Bush simply ignored all attempts to avert war. On January 17, 1991, the US and its allies attacked not just Iraqi forces in Kuwait but Baghdad and the whole of Iraq in an operation dubbed “Desert Storm”. The war ended on February 28 with the devastation of both Kuwait and Iraq and resulted in a massive destructive US politico-military “footprint” in this region following the war waged by his son.

Writing in Al-Monitor, former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel observed, “What is clear 25 years later is that the crisis transformed US policy in the Middle East. Before 1990, the region was a secondary or even tertiary area of importance to Washington.” He made the point that the US had “rarely deployed military forces in the region” and had only a few Cold War bases in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Bahrain. The US had briefly deployed troops in Lebanon in 1958 and in 1982 (the latter disastrously). And during the final years of the Iraq-Iraq war, the US navy had, Riedel said, “decimated the Iranian navy”. The huge 1990-91 deployment opened the door to other major military interventions, notably the disastrous 2003 war launched by Papa Bush’s son George W. “Baby” Bush, but did not earn Papa Bush a second term.

As I have suggested in earlier articles, Baby Bush decided to go to war for several reasons: to prove to Papa Bush that he was a “man” after years of being a disappointing son; to show the US electorate that he could be a “war president”; and to revamp the political map of the eastern Arab world to suit Israel and its friends and allies in his administration. Unfortunately Baby Bush was re-elected and continued to inflict on the world and the US a total of eight years of bad polices.

Between 1991 and 1993, Iraq was able to rebuild infrastructure devastated and damaged by Papa Bush’s war. If sanctions had been lifted then, the country could have largely recovered. Even under sanctions, Iraqis managed to restore domestic and, to a certain extent, external commercial relations. Secular Iraq remained firmly in the “Sunni” camp and antagonistic to Shiite Iran, regarded then by some as the greatest threat to the stability of the region. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein and his entourage took strong action against Al Qaeda and radical takfiri groups, refusing them house room in Iraq.

If Baby Bush had left Iraq alone in 2003 and, perhaps, eased up on sanctions, Baghdad would have remained a bulwark against jihadi radicalism. But Bush could not resist the war option and connived at the false pretext he gave for attacking Iraq — its non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Instead, Bush not only invaded and occupied Iraq, but also demobilised its army and security services, de-Baathified its civil service, installed a sectarian Shiite fundamentalist regime, and transformed the core country in this region into a failed state. Al Qaeda inspired fighters streamed into Iraq to fight the US occupation but were contained, briefly, when local Sunni tribesmen joined US troops in countering and suppressing Al Qaeda and its allies.

However, they were resurrected by the combination of the US troop withdrawal from Iraq and the rise of the radicals across the border in Syria. These groups were bolstered in Iraq by army officers dismissed by the US viceroy and members of the Army of the Naqshbandi Order, which had been founded and headed by Izzat Ibrahim Al Douri, one of Saddam Hussein’s close confidants. These officers and men, many of whom were Iraq-Iran war veterans, have transformed Daesh into a formidable foe with which the weak, poorly trained, corrupt sectarian Shiite Iraqi army cannot cope.

Instead, Baghdad — now under Tehran’s sway — is relying on Iranian raised, trained and armed Shiite militias that have abused and alienated Sunnis in the Anbar, Nineveh and Diyala provinces where Daesh has strongholds. This approach bodes ill for Iraq and for Syria where secular governments have steered these countries through minefields of sectarian politics since they became independent in the middle of the last century. Furthermore, the rise of sectarian militias, both Sunni and Shiite, has intensified Sunni-Shiite rivalries and led to sectarian proxy wars in Syria-Iraq and Yemen.

All of these developments go back a quarter of a century to Saddam Hussein’s dreadful decision to invade Kuwait and Papa Bush’s unwavering determination to respond with war.