George Bush and the Gulf War

¶ … 1990 Gulf War, but, given the subsequent perspective of the U.S. external policy during the following years, the actions that followed, the current war in Iraq, with its own justifications, bring a new light into the Middle East problem and the U.S. involvement in the entire region.

In 1990, George Bush had an excellent justification for an intervention in a region that had been, until then, an area of Soviet influence during the Cold War. Indeed, the Soviet support for Arab actions against Israel, the only American ally in the region, was notorious. With the Iraqi invasion in Kuwait in 1990, consequent with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States could finally be involved in a region that determines the trend of the global economy, given the largest oil reserves present here. In the beginning, as we can see from George Bush's speech, the involvement reduced itself to a moderating role: the United States contacted and moderated with the most important international organizations, with the European states and the Soviet Union, but also with the Arab League. The approach is interesting enough here: the aggression of an Arab state by another Arab state gave the United States the unexpected possibility to act as a moderator in a region where it would have had otherwise, at the respective moment, no significant powers.

However, the peaceful negotiations had no chances to succeed, and the United States already knew this, given Saddam Hussein's character, known to the Americans from the support they had provided for him during the Iran -- Iraq war. Following the leading role as a moderator in the conflict, the United States could now assume the military leading role, by leading a coalition that had a tremendous international support (George Bush mentions that there are five continents involved in taking military action against Iraq). The huge backup from most of the countries in the world, from the United Nations especially (and notice that this is an argument that George Bush often uses in his speech: Kuwait is a member of the UN and the UN Secretary General has already tried to mediate a conflicting situation), transforms the U.S. situation in 1990 in a perfectly legitimate situation.

In this sense, I tend to affirm and argue that the Gulf War was the first sign of a New World Order, something the Washington Administration can barely hide nowadays. The New World Order is equivalent to the extension of the American influence in the post-Cold War period to most strategic regions of the world and the Persian Gulf region is certainly one of them.

The void that was left with the disappearance of the Soviet Union needed to be filled by the only superpower left in the world and the Persian Gulf was the first sign that this was the new policy that the United States would follow upon. One only has to resume to describing some of the recent U.S. action in the area to understand that the American influence in terms of regional policy is being more and more felt.