By Tom Grein
28 February 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm. The operation marks the moment that the United States converted Charles Krauthammer’s ‘unipolar moment’ theory into practice and displayed its hegemonic credentials in its campaign against Iraq. In demonstrating its commitment to upholding the global liberal order—and its dominant role within it—the United States made Iraq not only the first state in the post-Cold War era to feel the weight of the world’s sole superpower, but an example to others, too.
When Saddam Hussein declared Kuwait as Iraq’s nineteenth province in August 1990, the international community almost unanimously condemned him. Even the Kuwaiti Ba’ath Party refused to bless Saddam’s campaign, although its leader disappeared soon after Iraq’s invasion. The Iraqi army would later be expelled by a US-led coalition of 35 nations, with Saudi Arabia and Egypt among other Arab states helping to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty.
In Saddam’s mind, the war wasn’t even meant to happen. He believed Vietnam had rattled the American psyche, and had made large scale military engagements in unfamiliar lands too risky for Washington. But he miscalculated, and when America decided to intervene after international diplomatic efforts failed to convince Saddam to leave peacefully, Iraq’s antiquated Chinese and Russian-made hardware was impotent against America’s F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft and M1 Abrams tanks.
The effects of the First Gulf War on the Middle East were immense. Notably, the war delivered a fatal blow to pan-Arabism as a viable political project, which was already declining in popularity as compared to rising nationalism and Islamism. Since the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Arab world had experimented with different administrative and conceptual structures to discover how the peoples of the Middle East would organise themselves. Gamel Abdul Nasser not only put a unified Arab identity on the map but provoked the formation of several pan-Arab political unions, including the United Arab Republic (1958-71) and the Arab Federation (1958). They ultimately failed in no small part due to logistical challenges, but pan-Arabism remained embedded as a potent political force in Arab societies.
The First Gulf War, however, was the first instance in contemporary Middle Eastern politics that an Arab state (Kuwait), accompanied by other Arab states, explicitly opposed another Arab state (Iraq) in war. Arab leaders not only rejected the Iraqi Ba’athist pan-Arab project but sided with the US in doing so. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates even lost soldiers in combat. Their action to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty signalled their commitment to the nation-state and desire to uphold the regional political order.
The abrogation of pan-Arabism as a political project further heightened the appeal of Islamist movements, which sought to replace pan-Arab sentiment with pan-Islamic identity and challenge the pro-Western Arab nationalism status quo. These pious political movements were callously repressed by Arab dictators. The Islamist pledge to offer an alternative to ‘un-Islamic’ governments persisted, however, as illustrated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt after thirty years of ruthless subjugation by Hosni Mubarak. In crushing Saddam’s pan-Arab project, the First Gulf War had a hand in elevating the attractiveness of pan-Islamic movements across the region.
The defeat of Saddam Hussein in 1991 was also a blow to the Palestine Liberation Organisation in their war against Israel. Iraq’s defeat not only nullified what they considered to be the last great hope of Arab military resistance but also showed the United States’ willingness to pursue its geopolitical interests in the Middle East with overwhelming force. In this respect, the war was the first real demonstration of Israel’s thick post-Cold War security blanket. Later that year, the Madrid Conference was convened, bringing Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arab states face-to-face in public peace negotiations for the first time. Just two years later, the Oslo Accords were signed. Iraq’s crushing defeat played a part in convincing Yasser Arafat that Israel was there to stay.
This article would be remiss not to mention that February 28th not only marks 30 years since America chose to leave Saddam Hussein in power but thirty years since an American foreign policy decision that potentially could have avoided the later Iraq War. Would Iraq be the fractured country it is today had American troops pushed on to Baghdad in 1991? Perhaps Bush Sr. would have simply removed Saddam, left the Ba’athist infrastructure in place and tried to intimidate its new leader into compliance, instead of dismantling the country’s civil institutions in an attempt to install a new government, as Bush Jr.’s administration did starting in 2003.
While neoconservatives believe America’s decision to leave Saddam in power was perhaps Washington’s biggest foreign policy mistake of the post-war era, Saddam’s removal in 2003 remains even more hotly contested. For all the counterfactual thought experiments that accompany these wars, the effects of the First Gulf War are often obscured by the large shadow cast by its second instalment. As a result, its import often escapes our attention. So, on this 30th anniversary, it is worth reflecting on how the war has shaped the modern Middle East, and how its legacy endures in subtle yet significant ways.
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