¶ … Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the Bush administration assembled a "winning" coalition of domestic and international supporters, and prevented opposing or "blocking" coalitions from forming. In several phases of coalition building, the Bush administration gained: access to bases in Saudi Arabia; financial support from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Germany; international legitimacy in the U.N. Security Council; a commitment from Israel not to respond if attacked; and domestic political support from the U.S. Congress. The Bush administration sequenced their coalition by starting with approaching the Arab coalition by recruiting the Saudis, who were arguably harder to recruit than other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The Bush administration sequenced their coalition assembly since doing so would influence parties' assessments of the potential returns to be realized from joining. Parties would take into consideration the previous countries who had agreed to join and those who were still to be approached. Looking at those who had agreed (or disagreed) to become involved would more likely influence the decision of the candidate regarding whether or not to join too. This, in turn, would influence the success of the coalition.

Coalition-assembly can be done in an easy-to-hard way with more likely-to-agree figures approached first, or it can be done in the reverse order. The Bush administration chose the hard-to-easy approach. This hard-to-easy approach of the Bush administration was smart in that it persuaded the other, more potentially reluctant parties to also join the coaltion.

The U.S. effort was particularly vulnerable with the Arab parties since they had to oppose...

More so, they owed obligations and commitments to Iraq since Iraq had helped the Arab nations fight many of their previous wars. Furthermore, most of the Arab nations (such s Saudi Arabia) were in alleged conflict with America and Israel. As the Kennedy School of Government Case Program notes:
Winning King Fahd's blessing for a U.S. deployment, even with the express purpose of defending Saudi Arabia would not be easy. American military bases were largely shut out of the Gulf, both because of cultural and religious differences, and because of America's pro-Israeli stance regarding the Palestinian problem and other Arab-Israeli disputes. As a result of such political tensions, most Arab countries avoided military alliances with the U.S., and even requests for short-term U.S. military support were often cloaked in secrecy. Moreover, some Arab leaders spurned American involvement because they suspected that the U.S. would exploit any opportunity to move into the region by establishing permanent bases and refusing to leave. (p.10)

One would have expected these nations, therefore, to be at best neutral and to decline offer of joining in the coalition. Their decision to do so support Watkins and Rosegrant's suggestion of the conceptual framework that is inherent in collation building and persuades other normally reluctant parties to join their opponent's group.

Watkins and Rosegrant (1996) point out that each of the collation parties had their own desires and interests. The Bush administration appealed to each of these. Secondly, the Bush administration approached the…