January 1991, after which date, if Iraq had not
by then left Kuwait, ‘all necessary means’ to drive
Iraqi forces out of Kuwait were authorised.
The Security Council was in rare unanimity. The
Chinese wished to show their respect for the
international rule of law after the world’s con-
demnation of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Gorbachev, who had met George Bush in
Helsinki on 9 September, was looking for Western
assistance to help meet the economic crisis at
home and joined the American president in con-
demning Iraq’s invasion. As the deadline drew
near, the mediating efforts of the UN secretary-
general Javier Perez de Cuéllar failed, as did a
last-minute attempt by Gorbachev.
Bush acted without hesitation, strongly sup-
ported by Margaret Thatcher. Saddam Hussein
could not be allowed to get away with his forcible
annexation. After Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the
other Gulf emirates would be at his mercy. As con-
troller of the Gulf’s oil, he could hold the industrial
world to ransom. Syria and Egypt were not pre-
pared to allow Saddam’s Iraq such a huge increase
of power either. Thus from the beginning the US
and Britain could count on regional Arab allies,
including of course the Gulf emirates and Saudi
Arabia, whose vast financial reserves were at the
disposal of the alliance. A war against Iraq would
thus not be another Western ‘colonial’ drubbing of
an Arab nation. The US mounted a tremendous
military effort, the largest since Vietnam, and the
speediest build-up of military might since the
Second World War. By the time the land war
began, half the forces were not American, though
the US had made by far the largest contribution to
the fighting forces on land, on the sea and in the
air. The command of the allied armies, more than
600,000 strong, was assumed by the US general
H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who soon became a
swashbuckling television personality. Never before
had almost every minute of a war been televised as
a worldwide spectacle. War was never formally
declared, and media correspondents remained in
Baghdad even through the weeks of air attacks
which preceded the land war.
Bush was the acknowledged leader of the
international effort, which comprised more than
thirty nations contributing forces, munitions or
cash. Principal among them were Britain, Egypt,
Syria, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
emirates, with further troops made up of exiled
Kuwaitis. Financial aid was provided by Germany
and Japan. Most of the twenty-eight allies had a
non-combatant role: for example, just over 200
men were sent from Czechoslovakia, all of them
medical and chemical-warfare specialists, while
310 Muslim mujahideen guarded shrines. Bush
was careful to keep within the limits set by the
UN resolutions. Six months were needed to build
up a force considered sufficient to deal with what
was said to be the fourth-largest army in the
world. Meanwhile diplomacy and increasing pres-
sure failed to move Saddam out of Kuwait. As a
gesture of goodwill early in December 1990, he
released the 20,000 foreigners working in Iraq,
3,000 of them Americans, whom he had held as
hostages, as ‘human shields’. He indicated a
readiness to withdraw from Kuwait if a Middle
Eastern conference were called to discuss not only
Kuwait but also Israel’s occupation of Arab terri-
tories and the Palestinian question, a ploy
designed to split the Arab nations aligned against
him. At worst he would emerge a hero in Arab
eyes for having forced a settlement of the
Palestinian demands. But Bush would permit no
direct linkage of the Palestine issue and Kuwait.
Saddam could not be seen to have profited from
aggression. The Iraqi leader now threatened ‘the
mother of battles’ for Kuwait and the use of
chemical weapons if attacked.
Early in the morning of 17 January 1991 the
shooting war, Desert Storm, began with air strikes
on strategic targets in Baghdad. For six weeks
thousands of air sorties were mounted against
Iraqi military targets, roads, bridges and essential
services. New high-technology weapons worked
with awesome accuracy. Inevitably there were also
innocent civilian casualties, most tragically when
an air-raid shelter in Baghdad received a direct
hit. Iraqi counter-strikes with Russian Scud
missiles were militarily ineffective but the devas-
tating allied air strikes were beginning to create a
popular Arab reaction in North Africa, Jordan and
other Muslim countries. It was overkill. By the
end of the onslaught, Iraq’s fighting morale had
been sapped. When the land war opened on 24914 GLOBAL CHANGE: FROM THE 20th TO THE 21st CENTURY