when the Iranians recaptured the strategic
city of Khorramshahr. This conquest signaled
an Iranian resurgence along the entire front,
and the Iraqis were pushed back to their own
borders. By June 1982, Hussein offered an im-
mediate truce and troop withdrawals, but the
Ayatollah insisted that his removal from of-
fice was a necessary precondition to any
peace talks. He refused to step down. The war
then dragged on, with six years of bloodshed
and gradual Iranian gains. Hussein, realizing
that he lacked the population base to over-
come his enemy, sought advanced weapons
and financial assistance from neighboring
Gulf states (which deplored Persians) and the
West. He also established close ties with the
Soviet Union to ensure a steady flow of mod-
ern weapons from that quarter of the world.
Through clever use of oil diplomacy, the
Iraqi leader bolstered his sagging military for-
tunes. By 1988, the Iranians had finally ex-
pended their manpower in a series of costly
and futile offensives, and a sudden Iraqi coun-
terattack threw them back several miles. On
August 20, 1988, a UN cease-fire brought this
costly conflict to a close. Both sides had lost
an estimated 250,000 lives and billions of dol-
lars in military equipment. Hussein also sul-
lied his reputation in the West with wide-
spread use of chemical weapons against Iran
and the Kurds—a violation of international
law. Nonetheless, he had gambled against Iran
and lost—yet still survived. Iraq emerged
from the contest stronger than before.
Hussein managed to survive his initial
blunder because both the West and the Gulf
states perceived revolutionary Iran as the
greater hazard to global security. Money and
important military intelligence were freely
given to him at the time. However, with peace
at hand, the Gulf states demanded the money
lent to be paid back. Moreover, under the
aegis of the Organization of Petroleum Ex-
porting Countries (known more commonly by
its acronym, OPEC), Arab states refused to
raise the price of oil on the worldwide mar-
ket. Now saddled with huge monetary debts,
Hussein began leaning hard on his tiny neigh-
bor to the south, the emirate of Kuwait, for
control of offshore islands, concessions on
the repayment of loans, and higher oil prices
to boost Iraq’s income. Kuwait dug in its heels
and flatly refused such coercion, and Hussein
threatened it with invasion. Few governments
in the Gulf region—or, for that matter, the
world—considered the dictator’s behavior as
anything more than a bully’s bluff.
Yet Hussein was not bluffing. On August 2,
1990, he ordered his armored columns south,
and tiny Kuwait was overrun in hours. This
move placed a powerful and unpredictable
dictator directly astride the oil fields of Saudi
Arabia, a region of strategic concern to Eu-
rope, Japan, and the United States. Conse-
quently, the United Nations quickly adopted
Resolution 660, calling for the immediate
withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. This
was followed by Resolution 661, which im-
posed worldwide economic sanctions against
Iraq. When neither of these measures induced
Hussein to relent, U.S. President George Bush
instigated Operation Desert Shield, a buildup
of American forces in Saudi Arabia. Hussein
countered by digging in 650,000 heavily armed
troops in and around Kuwait and taking sev-
eral hostages to use as “human shields”
around important Iraqi installations. On No-
vember 29, 1990, the United Nations issued
Resolution 678 calling for the release of all
hostages and the evacuation of Kuwait. The
Iraqis were given a January 15, 1991, deadline
to comply, at which point the use of military
force was authorized. Hussein did eventually
free his “guests,” as he termed them, but oth-
erwise refused to budge. A military confronta-
tion, on a scale not witnessed since World
War II, seemed imminent.
On January 17, 1991, a coalition of Ameri-
can, British, French, and Arab forces began a
concerted aerial bombardment campaign
against the Iraqi infrastructure and war ma-
chine. Hussein’s elite Republican Guard,
which also functioned as a praetorian guard,
was singled out for punishment. Hussein re-
taliated by launching several Soviet-made
SCUD missiles against targets in Kuwait andHUSSEIN, SADDAM