Abstract
The 1991 Gulf War, fought between the US-contrived Coalition forces and the armies of Saddam Hussein, followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990. It followed also the period during which Kuwait was part of the Ottoman vilayet of Basra and the 1922 Uqair Conference at which Sir Percy Cox, High Commissioner under the (British-controlled) Indian Army for Mesopotamia, wishing to cut through ‘impossible arguments and ridiculous claims’, resolved with a cavalier flourish of his hand what would constitute the frontiers of Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. And it followed the 1930 judgement of the British High Commissioner in Baghdad ‘that Britain should encourage the gradual absorption of Kuwait into Iraq’, with representatives of the British government contending ‘that Kuwait was a small and expendable state which could be sacrificed without too much concern if the power struggles of the period demanded it’.2
The United States might obliterate Iraq.
General Norman Schwarzkopf, 1 November 1990
We are closer to war with a Third World country. However, we are making plans as if it will be the Third World War.
General Merle MacBec, 3 November 1990
We will return you to the pre-industrial age.
Secretary of State James Baker, 9 January 1991
There was no water, no food, no milk — no people. … And this hell was still pouring from the skies. … Radi whispered through his dry lips, ‘Grandma’, and died in my lap. I looked at the sky and saw nothing. No flashes of bombs and bullets, no rubble. … Praise be to Allah, I have gone blind …’1
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Notes
Quoted by Dr Fadia Faqir, ‘Tales of war: Arab women in the eye of the storm’, in Victoria Brittain (ed.), TheGulfBetweenUs:TheGulfWar andBeyond (London: Virago Press, 1991) pp. 85–6; Faqir points out that some Vietnamese witnesses to the horrors of the Vietnam War suffered a psychologically induced blindness.
H. V. F. Winstone and Zahra Freeth, Kuwait: Prospect and Reality (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972) p. 111.
I have considered in detail the events leading up to the 1991 Gulf War — including Iraq’s grievances, the US ‘green light’, Western support for Saddam, and US manipulation of the United Nations — in Geoff Simons, Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam (London: Macmillan, 1994).
When Saddam Hussein commented to UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar that the UN resolutions were in reality American resolutions, ‘not what the Security Council wants’, Perez de Cuellar said: ‘I agree with you’ (The Independent, London, 12 December 1991).
US and Its Allies’ Crimes and Violations of Human Rights in Iraq. A Report on Part I: Crimes of the Military Aggression Against Iraq, Part II: The Blockade and Its Violations, prepared by a panel of international law experts in Iraq, The International Symposium, Baghdad, 5–8 February 1994, p. 13.
Paul Rogers, ‘Myth of a clean war buried in the sand’, The Guardian, London, 19 September 1991.
See, for example, John R. MacArthur, Second Front, Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) pp. 146–98.
Dilip Hiro, Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War (London: Paladin, 1992) p. 389.
Newsweek, 11 March 1991, quoted in Philip M. Taylor, War and the Media:Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) p. 251.
Michael Kelly, ‘Carnage on a forgotten road’, The Guardian, London, 11 April 1991.
Ibid.
Patrick Sloyan, ‘Iraqi troops buried alive say American officers’, The Guardian, London, 13 September 1991.
Barton Gellman, ‘Allied air war struck broadly in Iraq: officials acknowledge strategy went beyond purely military targets’, The Washington Post, 23 June 1991.
Ibid.
Amy Kasslow, ‘Shifting fortunes in the Arab world’, The Christian Science Monitor, 26 June 1991, p. 7.
John Vidal, ‘Poisoned sand and seas’, in Victoria Brittain (ed.), The Gulf Betveen Us, op. cit., p. 137.
Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991) p. 291.
Andre Petersen, ‘Archaeological sites a forgotten casualty of war’, letter, The Guardian, London, 4 February 1991.
Patrick Cockburn, ‘Iraq’s ancient treasures are the hidden casualties of war’, The Independent, London, 15 July 1991.
Muayad S. Damirji, editorial, Akkad, Department of Antiquities and Heritage, Baghdad, Number 2 (December 1994).
Isabel Boucher (‘The haemorrhage of looted art continues’, The Art Newspaper, Number 47, April 1995) describes the commercial flood of archaeological artefacts from Iraq, caused by the Gulf War. The British School of Archaeology in Iraq has published a 153-page document (LostHeritage: Antiquities Stolen frorn Iraq’s Regional Museums) listing the thousands of archaeological artefacts — amulets, arrowheads, beads, bottles, bowls, bracelets, cups, figurines, goblets, jars, necklaces, rings, seals, statues, tumblers, vases, etc. — looted from Iraq following the war.
Christopher Bellamy, ‘Arithmetic of death in wake of Gulf conflict’, The Guardian, London, 1 March 1991.
Simon Jones, ‘US demographer sacked for exposing Iraqi civilian deaths’, The Independent, London, 23 April 1992.
Robert Lifton, ‘Last refuge of a hi-tech nation’, The Guardian, London, 12 March 1991.
Lee Hockstadter, ‘Health crisis looms in Baghdad’, The Guardian, London, 5 March 1991.
Public Health in Iraq after the Gulf War, Harvard Study Team Report, May 1991.
Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Gulf war allies had nuclear option, claims officer’, The Guardian, London, 28 September 1991.
Mohamed Heikal, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War (London: HarperCollins, 1992) p. 289.
Nick Cohen, ‘Radioactive waste left in Gulf by allies’, The Independent on Sunday, London, 10 November 1991.
Ibid.
Nick Cohen and Tom Wilkie, ‘Gulf teams not told of risk from uranium’, The Independent on Sunday, London, 10 November 1991.
Greg Philo and Greg McLaughlin, ‘The first casualties of war’, New Statesman and Society, London, 29 January 1993.
Ibid.
Felicity Arbuthnot, ‘Allies’ shells leave deadly radiation’, Scotland on Sunday, 18 March 1993.
David Albright, ‘The desert glows — with propaganda’, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1993, pp. 11–12, 46.
Peter Jenkins, ‘War continues by other means’, The Independent, London, 24 April 1991.
Louise Cainkar, ‘Desert sin: a post-war journey through Iraq’, in Phillis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck (eds), Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader (London: Canongate, 1992) pp. 335–55.
Patrick E. Tyler, ‘Bush links ending of trading ban to Hussein exit’, The New York Times, 21 May 1991.
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© 1998 Geoff Simons
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Simons, G. (1998). The Legacy of War. In: The Scourging of Iraq. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-50543-8_1
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