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The Gulf War's Afterlife

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The Gulf War's Afterlife The Scholar THE GULF WAR’S AFTERLIFE: DILEMMAS, MISSED OPPORTUNITIES, AND THE POST-COLD WAR ORDER UNDONE SAMUEL HELFONT 25 The Gulf War’s Afterlife: Dilemmas, Missed Opportunities, and the Post-Cold War Order Undone The Gulf War is often remembered as a “good war,” a high- tech conflict that quickly and cleanly achieved its objectives. Yet, new archival evidence sheds light on the extended fallout from the war and challenges this neat narrative. The Gulf War left policymakers with a dilemma that plagued successive U.S. administrations. The war helped create an acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq, and the United States struggled to find a way to contain a still recalcitrant Saddam Hussein while alleviating the suffering of innocent Iraqis. The failure of American leaders to resolve this dilemma, despite several chances to do so, allowed Saddam’s regime to drive a wedge into the heart of the American-led, post-Cold War order. While in the short term the war seemed like a triumph, over the years its afterlife caused irreparable harm to American interests. n June 1991, nearly 5 million onlookers en- American politics. Both the Clinton and Obama ad- thusiastically welcomed American troops ministrations admired the way President George returning home from the Gulf War as they H. W. Bush handled the conflict.5 Despite some marched in a ticker-tape parade through handwringing about Saddam Hussein remaining in NewI York City’s “Canyon of Heroes.”1 This image power and the fact that there was no World War of the Gulf War as a triumph has proved endur- II-style surrender, the conflict is still remembered ing. As two historians of the war wrote a decade as a “good war” or, as one Marine Corps general later, the Gulf War was “one of the most success- described it, a “beautiful thing.”6 Unsurprisingly, it ful campaigns in American military history.”2 For has had an outsize impact on the way Americans many Americans, the war exorcised the demons think war should be conducted.7 of Vietnam.3 Others have contrasted the success Yet, just a few miles north of the June 1991 tick- of the 1991 Gulf War with the failure of the 2003 er-tape parade, the difficulties American diplomats Iraq War.4 Such praise has transcended domestic were facing at the United Nations offered a quite 1 Susan Baer, “Desert Storm Takes N.Y. 5 Million Attend Ticker-Tape Parade,” Baltimore Sun, June 11, 1991, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/ bs-xpm-1991-06-11-1991162064-story.html. 2 Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller Jr., Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), xiii. 3 E.J. Dionne Jr., “Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome,” Washington Post, March 4, 1991, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/poli- tics/1991/03/04/kicking-the-vietnam-syndrome/b6180288-4b9e-4d5f-b303-befa2275524d/. 4 Richard N. Haass, “The Gulf War: Its Place in History,” in Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57–83; and Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (New York: Mariner Books, 2014). 5 Warren Christopher, In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 11; and Jeffery Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic, April 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doc- trine/471525/. 6 Kirk Spitzer, “25 Years Later, Desert Storm Remains the Last Good War,” USA Today, Feb. 27, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opin- ion/2016/02/27/column-25-years-later-desert-storm-remains-last-good-war/81033112/. 7 Rebecca Friedman Lissner, “The Long Shadow of the Gulf War,” War on the Rocks, Feb. 24, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/02/the- long-shadow-of-the-gulf-war/. 26 The Scholar different image of the war’s place in history. The establish a more sustainable policy on Iraq. Both of Gulf War had caused much more damage to Iraqi these opportunities offered a way out of the dilem- infrastructure than American officials had antic- ma that America faced in the wake of the Gulf War ipated or acknowledged. As a result, the conflict and seizing them would have led to more favorable contributed to an acute humanitarian crisis that outcomes for U.S. interests and for the post-Cold developed during and after the war. Moreover, the War system. Iraqi regime was carrying out atrocities against its Bush had sold the Gulf War as a way to forge the own people and failing to abide by the Gulf War’s post-Cold War international system into a “new ceasefire agreement that permitted U.N. inspectors world order” that would unite the globe in a liber- full access to its weapons sites. In response, the al, American-led system rooted in the rule of law.8 United States insisted on keeping economic sanc- This was a laudable goal. Yet, the fallout from that tions on Iraq in place to coerce the Iraqi regime war ultimately undermined any hopes for such a into full compliance. However, these sanctions fur- system. New archival material from the Iraqi Baath ther deepened the emerging humanitarian crisis in Party’s archives and the Clinton Library demon- Iraq, punishing civilians for the crimes of a regime strates how humanitarian issues in Iraq poisoned that they had little ability to influence. Through- American foreign relations and became a weapon out the following decade, the inability of the United for Iraq and other states to undermine American States to find a way out of this dilemma plagued leadership of the international system. The result- American diplomacy and diminished the country’s ing frustration and ill will propelled the United international standing. States into the 2003 Iraq War, which only further This outcome was not inevitable. Following the undermined its international standing. war, at least two opportunities arose for finding a Most critical analyses of the Gulf War fail to con- formula to hold Baghdad accountable while also sider the aftermath of the war.9 When they do, they alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. As new often debate whether the United States won the archival material makes clear, the American fail- Gulf War but lost the peace.10 However, that debate ure to seize either of these opportunities caused artificially separates the war from its political fall- lasting, and probably irreparable, damage to U.S. out, including the 2003 Iraq War. In fact, most de- interests and to the post-Cold War order that the bates about Iraq that occurred in 2003 — including United States wanted to build. The first opportu- debates about regime change — had their origins nity emerged from a plan in the summer of 1991 to in the dilemma that the Gulf War created for U.S. separate the humanitarian situation in Iraq from policy. This article explicitly links these events, of- the United Nations’ attempt to eliminate illicit fering a corrective to historical narratives of the Iraqi weapons programs. The second opportunity Iraq wars. arose following Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. Ira- These insights stem from new research with Ira- qi records show that once Clinton replaced Bush, qi, American, and U.N. records.11 The Iraqi archives Baghdad was prepared to adjust its approach to the are particularly interesting and have generated a United States and the international community. As wealth of new literature over the past decade.12 a result, the United States had a clear chance to However, immersing oneself in Iraqi and Arabic 8 George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress,” Speech, Washington, DC, Sept. 11, 1990, available at the Miller Center, Uni- versity of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-11-1990-address-joint-session-congress. 9 For example, see Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995); Marvin Pokrant, Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Marolda and Schneller, Shield and Sword; James A. Winnefeld, Preston Niblack, and Dana J. Johnson, A League of Airmen: U.S. Air Power in the Gulf War (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp., 1994); and Daryl G. Press, “The Myth of Air Power in the Persian Gulf War and the Future of Warfare,” International Security 26, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 5–44, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092121. 10 Though he takes a different position than this article, Joshua Rovner provides a good overview of this debate in Joshua Rovner, “Delusion of De- feat: The United States and Iraq, 1990–1998,” Journal of Strategic Studies 37, no. 4 (2014): 482–507, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.891074. 11 In addition to some primary documents from the George H. W. Bush administration, archival records used in this article include the Ba‘th Regional Command Collection, housed at the Hoover Archives and Library, Stanford University (hereafter cited as BRCC); the Conflict Records Re- search Center, formerly housed at the National Defense University, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as CRRC); the Clinton Library Archives, housed at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, Little Rock, AR and online at the Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentialli- braries.us (hereafter cited as Clinton Library); and the National Security Archive at George Washington University, Washington, DC and online at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/ (hereafter cited as the National Security Archive).
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