Kuwait Invaded
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to “peace” who were willing to allow Iraq to retain Kuwait. Hundreds of male hostages were even spread among strategic targets throughout Iraq to deter bombing of those sites.55 Though the hostages dominated news reports and much of the diplomatic maneuvering throughout the fall of 1990, in the end Saddam apparently decided that they were not going to help him achieve his goals. He announced their impending release on 6 December, and they had all departed Iraq by mid-December. On 28 August, Saddam formally annexed Kuwait as Iraq’s 19th province, thus “restoring the branch to the tree.” There would be a great deal of talk and discussion over the next five months, but Iraq refused to withdraw, attempting instead to split the international community and subvert the Coalition opposing its invasion. Iraqi intransigence and the international community’s refusal to allow Iraq to benefit from its aggression drove events toward a military conclusion. As diplomacy continued over the coming months, the United States built up the forces required for the impending confrontation.
The American Military Response At the time, the Iraqi Army was commonly judged to be the fourth-largest military force in the world, and it was considered battle-hardened by the nearly decade-long Iran-Iraq War. The invasion of Kuwait had been extremely swift, and surprisingly effective; the problems the Iraqi military encountered were not widely known. In fact, events would prove the Iraqi military was largely a hollow shell, with demoralized, poorly trained troops greatly outnumbering the better-trained and better-equipped Republican Guard units. But in August 1990, this was not obvious, and Iraq’s historical willingness to use poison gas against its enemies increased the threat it represented. In contrast, the American military in 1990 was relatively untested. The 1970s had been the nadir of American military effectiveness, with drug use and racial conflict reportedly common among American servicemembers. The military had an abundance of advanced weaponry, and service personnel had undergone a decade-long revitalization, but neither the equipment nor the troops had been tested in combat on a large scale. The fiasco of the rescue attempt during the Iranian hostage crisis and the failure of the Marine deployment to Lebanon in the 1980s added to the specter of defeat lingering from the American experience in Vietnam, but there were some small-scale
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Secretary of Defense Richard B. “Dick” Cheney gave military leaders great leeway in conducting the Gulf War. He later served as vice president under President George W. Bush.
conflicts that offered a glimpse of American capabilities. The invasion of Grenada in 1983, the invasion of Panama in 1989, and the air conflicts with Libya in the mid-1980s had all been successful operations despite some setbacks. Events would prove that the American military of the 1990s was the besttrained, best-equipped, and most professional large military in the world at that time, but those events were in the future as American military commanders considered how to make President Bush’s promise that Iraq’s aggression would not stand a military reality. The American military was operating under a new organizational plan following the GoldwaterNichols Act of 1986. Prior to the act, the chain of command had flowed from the president through the service secretaries down to the service chiefs and on to the individual services. Interservice rivalry was built directly into the system. A direct response to the perceived failures in the system demonstrated during the Iran hostage crisis, the
