political conFlictS and Migration in the Mena StateS 169
region – something that has yet to be determined (and perhaps may never
be decided in favour of a single protagonist).
There are several stakeholders striving for hegemony in the Gulf region.
Although the main ones are those states directly situated in the Gulf region
(Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states), there are two other
factors to be considered:
- The intervention of external countries in the power play in the Gulf –
primarily the US, but also Russia, China and individual EU countries.
They inf luence the situation considerably, since individual countries are
weakened or strengthened depending on the role these MENA-external
states play in the region. - The inner conditions and the economic performance of the individual
countries play an important role. The relative importance of the MENA
countries in the regional power play depends on the type and extent
of their internal conf licts,^12 and on the economic factors that inf luence
their freedom of action, both positively and negatively.
The First Gulf War (1980-1988) was triggered by the invasion of the Iranian
province of Khuzistan by Iraqi forces on 22 September 1980. This so-called
First Gulf War, which lasted eight years and ended by ceasef ire on 18 July
1988,^13 was off icially fought over territorial disputes; the real reasons,
however, were much more complicated. In particular, the 1979 Iranian
Revolution and the waves it caused in the region – including the active
policy of exporting the Islamic revolution to neighbours (Djalili 1989) –
posed a challenge to the primarily secular nationalistic Baath Party and the
approximately 60 per cent Shiite population in Iraq of the kind that had to
be met with war. The ideological component was thus, besides the strategic
considerations and the international implications of that war (Cordesman
1988; Karsh 1989), the cause that was most often studied (Reissner 1987).
The Second Gulf War (1991) had its roots in the territorial disputes be-
tween Iraq and the Emirate of Kuwait (Hippler 1991; Schof ield 1993). Hardly
any other event of the 1990s (except for the Middle East conf lict in toto)
polarised and inf luenced political development in the MENA countries as
strongly as did this war. The occupation of Kuwait by Iraqi troops on 2 Au-
gust 1990 not only led to the deployment of international troops, under the
leadership of the US military, to free Kuwait (military operations began on
12 One example is the internal Sunni-Shiite conf lict in Bahrain, which escalated in 2011 in the
context of the Arab Spring.
13 The f irst Gulf War was thus the longest war in this sub-region since World War II.