This is a story of the unintended consequences of a Pyrrhic victory celebrated 35 years ago as a history-making triumph. As the U.S. fights its latest war in the Persian Gulf — this time against Iran, the country that benefited most from Saddam Hussein’s demise — it’s a good moment to reflect on Operation Desert Storm. That intervention now appears to have been an avoidable war that set the United States on a disastrous course from which it has failed to extricate itself. What seemed like a clean victory in 1991 has turned into a strategic quagmire. At the time, the decision to intervene seemed straightforward. On August 2, 1990, 100,000 Iraqi soldiers overran Kuwait in a few hours, initiating “a systematic campaign of pillage, rape, torture, murder, and theft,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Seven months later, a U.S.-led coalition totaling 800,000 troops expelled the Iraqi army from Kuwait, torching its tanks, armored personnel carriers, transport, and even looted civilian vehicles retreating on the “Highway of Death.” A ground war that had raised fears of “ another Vietnam ” was over in 100 short hours, validating the notion that the U.S. could avoid a morass and restore regional stability through U.N.-sanctioned war. President George H. W. Bush’s approval rating reached 89%, and memories of the national victory parade reinforced the narrative of a decisive and necessary war that set the rules of a “ new world order .” It turned out to be the opening chapter in a long, draining conflict.
Desert Storm spawned the inevitable unintended consequences that follow any war, creating new, vexing problems that pulled the U.S. deeper into the quagmire. Once committed to containing Iraq’s tinpot dictator, Washington drifted from one short-sighted policy to another, often resorting to military action. And magical thinking, rather than adequate planning, was as common then as it is today. For instance, as journalist-historian Steve Coll details in The Achilles Trap, “Bush administration planners considered an insider coup carried out by military officers to be most likely and desirable — a quick change of regime that would leave Iraq in the hands of a more manageable strongman.” The president also called for an uprising but “failed to anticipate and plan for the entirely plausible scenario that it confronted,” such as a Shia revolt that might empower Iran.
Saddam’s regime brutally crushed the Kurdish and Shia revolts, leading to the establishment of no-fly zones and intermittent, indecisive bombing campaigns throughout the 1990s to protect civilian populations and enforce U.N. weapons inspections. Presidents Bush and Clinton approved covert operations to kill or remove Saddam, and the Iraq Liberation Act , enacted by Congress in 1998 and signed by Clinton, established “regime change” in Iraq as official U.S. policy. The opportunity to drive all the way to Baghdad came after 9/11. If Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 had listened to the Dick Cheney who served as defense secretary under George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War, another set of calamitous unintended consequences might have been averted.
In an interview with C-SPAN, Cheney bluntly stated that going all the way to Baghdad in 1991 would have created destabilizing chaos. "Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can very easily see pieces of Iraq fly off."
This incomplete chronology raises a tantalizing question worth confronting anew as the United States sinks billions more into another unnecessary war, the problems of counterfactual history notwithstanding: Should the U.S. have ignored Saddam in 1990? The question is neither new nor crazy. Decision-makers considered doing so in the initial days after his invasion of Kuwait. Oil was on their minds, not Kuwait’s sovereignty or other high ideals like democracy or freedom.
As historian Jeffrey Engel revealed in his study of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, transcripts of the first National Security Council meeting convened after August 2 show key participants, including Cheney, discussing “whether it really mattered, from a purely strategic standpoint, if an Iraqi or Kuwaiti flag was printed on the side of an exported barrel.” Saudi Arabia should be defended to prevent Iraq from achieving regional oil dominance, but, in the words of then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, “Does anybody really care about Kuwait?” “They were hardcore realists” in that first NSC meeting, Engel tells me . “Dick Cheney essentially says, ‘Listen, why do we care about the Middle East at all? We care about its oil. What does Saddam want to do? He wants to sell oil. In fact, he wants to sell oil at a cheaper price than we’re currently getting… This actually could work out pretty well for us.’” Within days, however, the “realist” approach quickly gave way to a global imperative to enforce the rules of the “rules-based order.” With little foresight, the U.S. committed itself to confronting Saddam Hussein for another dozen years. It need not have come to a crisis over tiny Kuwait. As Coll argues in The Achilles Trap , “In the cascade of errors that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration’s failure to deter Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait — as well as Saddam’s failure to grasp what would happen after he acted — stand out… Irrational, rageful, and blind though he could be, Saddam was clearly deterrable — on more than one occasion, he refrained from using chemical weapons because he feared massive retaliation from Israel or the United States.”
Coll concedes that “perhaps the catastrophic turning point of the Kuwait invasion was unavoidable,” but the question of why the U.S. did not avoid destructive wars in Iraq, as it has with other troublesome countries such as North Korea, still looms large. Iraq had been, after all, the Sunni secular counter-balance to the Shia ayatollahs in Tehran. (Saddam expected the Arab oil fiefdoms to repay him for checking Khomeini’s ambitions during the long war of 1980-88. Saudi Arabia effectively forgave Iraq’s war debts; Kuwait refused.) Iran’s regional power and political influence greatly expanded after its nemesis was removed in 2003, with implications that are all too obvious today.
Therefore, the first Gulf War was less a discrete event than part of a larger pattern covering four decades of interventionism across the Greater Middle East. Covert operations, invasions, occupations, sanctions, regime changes, air strikes, coercive diplomacy — they rarely, if ever, produced lasting positive outcomes while killing or immiserating hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. The meager results raise a deeper issue: why does history’s most powerful country continue to feel so threatened by far weaker foes? Washington’s perpetual feelings of insecurity may not be what drives interventionism. The political theorist Naeem Inayatullah suggests a more convincing explanation: our military adventurism stems from “the hubris that comes with being a hegemon and a superpower, combined with the ideology that goes hand-in-hand with those two structural positions.” Hegemony, in other words, transcends partisanship. It’s a national project.
In an interview, Inayatullah told me, “As Thucydides shows us in his Melian Dialogue, a new potential hegemon starts by touting and believing in ideals. Each new superpower claims through its own hubris that it will make the world a better place for freedom and equality. But that power makes the hegemon and its ideals pawns to power’s own laws: ‘the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.’ No superpower we have known has been able to overcome this pattern. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It just means that we have yet to see it.” Add to the structure of power politics the forces of racism and capitalism, along with the opportunities and expectations that come with holding the world’s most powerful office — the U.S. presidency — and you have a foundation for endless war, Inayatullah says.
“But why leave that mark on the Middle East? The Middle East is still the central knot of the planet: structures of racism are most dramatic there, and the world economy’s needs, through the accidental location of oil reserves, are most expressed there. Each president will try to unknot the world there. Each president will assume that the failure of his predecessors was the result of individual stupidity and mistakes in policy, rather than all kinds of structural problems.”
Safeguarding the flow of oil goes back to the Carter Doctrine, announced in 1980. But oil's importance has diminished over the past 35 years relative to other reasons driving intervention, such as counter-terrorism and, most recently, supporting Israel’s national and regional security agendas as a matter of U.S. foreign policy. So, the reasons change, but the goal is fixed: to uphold U.S. hegemony in the Middle East.
Some historians may bristle at the notion that Donald Trump and his predecessors belong in the same category. Yet they all, to varying degrees, could not resist exercising their immense power to recreate the Greater Middle East through violence — not despite past failures, but because of them. Each new effort to stem the United States’ strategic decline may have merely accelerated it, leaving a legacy of destruction rather than liberation.