Gulf War Reasons
Here's a history lesson that includes the false statements that were made about human abuses as the "reason" for war:
The United States, especially
Secretary of State James Baker, assembled a coalition of forces to join it in opposing Iraq, consisting of soldiers from 34 countries:
Afghanistan,
Argentina,
Australia,
Bahrain,
Bangladesh,
Canada,
Czechoslovakia,
Denmark,
Egypt,
France,
Greece,
Hungary,
Honduras,
Italy,
Kuwait,
Morocco,
The Netherlands,
Niger,
Norway,
Oman,
Pakistan,
Poland,
Portugal,
Qatar,
Saudi Arabia,
Senegal,
South Korea,
Spain,
Syria,
Turkey, the
United Arab Emirates, the
United Kingdom and the
United States itself. US troops represented 74% of 660,000 troops in the theater of war. Many of the coalition forces were reluctant to join; some felt that the war was an internal Arab affair, or feared increasing American influence in Kuwait. In the end, many nations were persuaded by Iraq's belligerence towards other Arab states, and offers of economic aid or debt forgiveness.
Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. and President Bush visit U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia on Thanksgiving Day, 1990.
The United States went through a number of different public justifications for their involvement in the conflict. The first reasons given were the importance of oil to the American economy and the United States' longstanding friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia. However, some Americans were dissatisfied with these explanations and "No Blood For Oil" became a rallying cry for domestic opponents of the war, though they never reached the size of opposition to the
Vietnam War. Later justifications for the war included Iraq's history of human rights abuses under President Saddam Hussein, the potential that Iraq may develop
nuclear weapons or
weapons of mass destruction, and that
"naked aggression will not stand."
Although the human rights abuses of the Iraq regime before and after the Kuwait invasion were well-documented, the government of Kuwait set out to influence American opinion with a few spectacular, but embellished and false accounts. Shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the organization
Citizens for a Free Kuwait was formed in the US. It hired the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton for about $11 million, money from the Kuwaiti government. This firm went on to manufacture a campaign which described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and letting them die on the floor. A video news release was widely distributed by US TV networks; false supporting testimony was given before Congress and before the UN Security Council. The fifteen-year-old girl testifying before Congress was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States; the supposed surgeon testifying at the UN was in fact a dentist who later admitted to having lied. (
For more, see Nurse Nayirah.)
Various peace proposals were floated, but none were agreed to. The United States insisted that the only acceptable terms for peace were Iraq's full, unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. Iraq insisted that withdrawal from Kuwait must be "linked" to a simultaneous withdrawal of Syrian troops from
Lebanon and Israeli troops from the
West Bank,
Gaza Strip, the
Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon.
Morocco and
Jordan were persuaded by this proposal, but
Syria,
Israel, and the anti-Iraq coalition denied that there was any connection to the Kuwait issue. Syria joined the coalition to expel Saddam but Israel remained officially neutral despite rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. The Bush administration persuaded Israel to remain outside the conflict with promises of increased aid, while the
PLO under
Yasser Arafat openly supported Saddam Hussein, leading to a later rupture in Palestinian-Kuwaiti ties and the expulsion of many Palestinians from Kuwait.
On
January 12,
1991 the
United States Congress authorized the use of military force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Soon after the other states in the coalition did the same.
