Innehållsförteckning för Issue 9 från War at Sea

IN August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces seized Kuwait in a military intervention. Baghdad’s aim was to secure the Gulf state’s oil reserves and expand the country’s authority in the Middle East. The United Nations called on Iraq to withdraw and on 6 August 1990, imposed a worldwide ban on trade with Iraq. President Hussein responded by formally annexing Kuwait. Iraq’s military ambition threatened Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter and prompted the United States and its western European allies in NATO to respond in support of Kuwait and prevent wider instability across the Gulf. Egypt and several other Arab nations joined the anti-Iraq Coalition in a mission which became known as Operation Desert Storm. Iraq increased its military garrison in Kuwait with more than 250,000 troops reported to…

International leaders agreed that Saddam’s actions risked further conflict and in a unique Coalition of Arab nations, several influential Muslin nations joined the multi-national force to stop the spread of Baghdad’s bloody ambitions. Saddam Hussein was a despot and after the Iran-Iraq war had a huge unemployed army, an ailing economy and was eager to become ‘the’ regional power-force. Furthermore, Iraq was heavily in debt to Kuwait as a result of money it had borrowed to fund its war against Tehran. This had been used to buy missiles, tanks, fighter planes - many of which had been destroyed in the conflict with Iran. He had been born to a peasant family in 1937 and was a devoted follower of the Ba’ath party, the radical nationalist organisation with fascist overtones which…

A particular concern between Baghdad and Tehran in the 1970s was control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, a disputed area between the two countries formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which discharge into the Persian Gulf at Basra in southern Iraq. In 1975, officials from Iran and Iraq negotiated a future security pact called the Algiers Agreement, also known as the Algiers Accord. It was designed to settle any disputes and conflicts concerning their common border – such as the Shatt al-Arab, also known as Arvand Rud in Iran. A turning point occurred with the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. The conflict toppled the pro-Western government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pallavi in favour of a fundamentalist regime led by Shi’ite regime, led by the Muslim cleric Ayatollah…

But Saddam’s officers lacked the confidence to present and consider ‘options’ fearing that a wrong decision may upset or aggravate their commander in chief, Saddam. He was the dominant decision maker in Iraq’s military and his miscalculations shaped his county’s political and military response to the crisis. Saddam’s view in Iraq was both sweeping and absolute. He formally controlled every state, administrative, the Ba’ath Party, and military hierarchy across the country: He simultaneously held the posts of President, Prime Minister and Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He was god. Iraq under Saddam Hussein could be described in 1990 as a ‘Third World’ power trying to build a first-class military. While the government and military enjoyed good social conditions the wider pubic suffered under a vicious regime. In Baghdad, Saddam’s…

The Gulf states’ refusal to cancel Iraq’s war debts contributed to Saddam Hussein’s decision to make threats against Iraq’s rich, but militarily weak neighbour, Kuwait. After the Kingdom rejected Saddam’s proposal to cancel the debt, he threatened to reignite a conflict over the long-standing issue of ownership of the Warbah and Bubiyan Islands. This was important to Iraq because of the access afforded to its ports, such as Um Qasr, on the Khawr Abd Allah - the waterway to the Persian Gulf which remained the only viable alternative to the closed Shatt Al-’Arab, cluttered with debris from the Iran-Iraq war. The dispute over the Bubiyan and Warbah Islands was a key point of contention in the lengthy history of territorial conflict between Iraq and Kuwait. Years earlier in 1961, when…

Political backing for intervention in Kuwait was global, including the UN. This avoided international condemnation of the military action. Jordan and Iran were vocal in their opposition to conflict while the most surprising reaction to the Iraqi invasion in the Middle East came from the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who emerged as the prominent supporter of the Iraqi President. The pro-Iraqi position of the Palestinian leadership as well as of the Palestinian communities in Kuwait, Jordan, and the occupied territories subsequently became catastrophic for the group’s cause. After the liberation of Kuwait, an estimated 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait and other Gulf Arab states. Jordan faced the bulk of the problem as most Palestinian returnees were Hashemite residents. Later, when Mahmoud Abbas was elected President in January 2005 following…