Abstract
America went to war against Iraq under the United Nations’ Charter to repel Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. As head of an international coalition, it also defended Saudi Arabia and the West’s access to the region’s oil. In brief, the United States fought to preserve the status quo in the Persian Gulf. If Hussein’s conquest stood, then it would have upset the Middle East’s political order. The war confirmed America’s superpower status that its eclipse of the Soviet Union had earlier announced. Most strikingly, it reinforced America’s bent to act as a global stabilizer and set the stage ultimately for the imposition of a Western multiconfessional democracy by military occupation in a region fiercely resentful of a non-Muslim presence.
I was convinced that the best way was to shape opinion not by rhetoric but by action.
George H. W. Bush, September 1990
If man does find the solution for world peace, it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.
George C. Marshall
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Notes
William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), pages 395–397;
and Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pages 167, 193–197.
Amatzia Baram, “The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait: Decision-Making in Baghdad,” in Iraq’s Road to War, ed. Amatzia Baram and Barry Rubin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), page 12.
James A. Baker III with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son, 1995), page 263.
George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), page 311.
Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), pages 81–85.
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HaperCollins, 1993), page 824.
George H. W Bush, “Address to the 44th Session of the United Nations General Assembly,” New York, September 23, 1991, George Bush Presidential Library. Downloaded from http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/papers/1991/91092301.html (accessed May 14, 2007).
Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire (Washington, DC: Regenery, 1999), page 359.
Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), page 521.
Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The General’s War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1995), page 37.
Robert S. Litwak, Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Containment after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000), page 126.
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© 2007 Thomas H. Henriksen
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Henriksen, T.H. (2007). The Persian Gulf War. In: American Power after the Berlin Wall. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230606920_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230606920_4
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