Operation Desert Storm Research Paper

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In 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait, Iraq’s neighbor, over a dispute regarding oil production and debt. Iraq had protected Kuwait during the Iran-Iraq War the previous decade and Hussein wanted the debt owed by Iraq to Kuwait canceled. He also accused the U.S. and Israel of meddling and saw Kuwait as a puppet state of the West. Operation Desert Storm was coalition effort to push back Saddam Hussein and Iraqi forces to ensure Kuwaiti independence. George H. Bush declared that Iraqi soldiers were committing heinous atrocities in Kuwait (though these claims were later disproven). The war was thus based partly upon a fabricated narrative so that American forces could be used to drive Hussein out of Kuwait and prevent him from annexing the small state and becoming more powerful. While it was a brief war, lasting a little over a month, Desert Storm essentially laid the groundwork for the future Iraq War (started in 2003). This paper will show how George H. Bush led a brief war against Hussein in 1991 that would be picked back up a little more than a decade later by George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11.

George H. Bush laid the blame for the conflict at the doorstep of Hussein when he stated in his announcement of the war that “This conflict started August 2nd when the dictator of Iraq invaded a small and helpless neighbor” (Bush). Bush emphasized that Operation Desert Storm was essentially a humanitarian in the sense that American forces were going into combat in order to protect a weaker nation from a larger, bullying nation. To further make the case that intervention was needed, Bush relied on testimony of a young girl who in Kuwait who said she witnessed Iraqi soldiers ruthlessly taking Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in a hospital and throwing them onto the ground to die: as Douglas Walton noted, Bush “repeated the story at least ten times in the

following weeks, using the words ‘Babies pulled from incubators’” (771) to emphasize the dramatic need for American forces to stop the heinous Iraqis.

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The only problem was the testimony was fabricated—the reports were untrue; nonetheless, they served as a pretext for invasion (Walton), just as the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush in 2003 would be based upon bogus intelligence about Iraq having mobile weapons labs and weapons of mass destruction (Kellner). In other words, George H. Bush’s use of bogus intelligence to justify the invasion set the stage for his son George W. Bush’s use of bogus intelligence in the second Iraq war a decade later when the latter claimed that Hussein, once again, was an aggressor seeking to support the spread of terrorism through the development of WMDs. Like father, like son—so the maxim goes; and in the cases of the Bush family it was true with this one exception: whereas, Operation Desert Storm was a brief battle with a clearly defined objective, the second invasion was much more loosely and broadly conceived and as a result went on for much longer. George H. Bush was careful, however, to signify that the cause of the Gulf War was Hussein himself and that all America intended to do was protect its little Middle Eastern brother, Kuwait, from the bigger, badder bully.

Secondly, Operation Desert Storm changed the way the U.S. operated in the Middle East. As Cecil Crabb and Kevin Mulcahy showed, “Operation Desert….....

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