Desert Storm: Operation and impact

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. 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 Storm was a momentous development in the foreign relations of the United States…[with] far reaching consequences both for the content of American foreign policy and for the decision-making process” (251). Operation Desert Storm displayed to the world that America was going to act like the world’s policeman, asserting itself in the affairs of other nations if those other nations dared to act like bullies or dared to step out of line. It is also showed that America had a keen interest in shaping the Middle East. It was not going to sit idly by while Saddam Hussein became stronger. While Hussein criticized America as the aggressor and American and Israel in particular as working together to undermine the Middle East and to harm Iraq, George H. Bush showed by the short duration of Desert Storm that he was, ultimately, only going to push Hussein out of Kuwait back to his own country and leave it at that. Bush stated that he was fighting a war against Aggression, much like his son would later state that he was fighting a war against Terror. Aggression, it turns out, was much easier to stop: speaking before Congress on March 7th, 1991, Bush stated, “Aggression is defeated. The war is over.” George W. Bush would give a similar speech in 2003 claiming, prematurely, that the mission was accomplished—even though the war on terror would continue for another 15 years and is still ongoing today.
Finally, Operation Desert Storm created a dangerous precedent for future leaders in the U.S. It demonstrated that the president could go to war with little more than faulty pretexts just to make a geopolitical point. This precedent would be used by Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump under the current administration. Every leader since George H. Bush has used the Operation Desert Storm approach to geopolitical issues to assert the American point of view in the affairs of others, often resulting in regime change. Though Operation Desert Storm did not result in the overthrow of Hussein, it most certainly opened the door for such an operation in the future. In other words, Operation Desert Storm was the war that ushered in the era of lying in order to win public support for wars in the Middle East (Kellner). The collusion between the White House and the fabricators of evidence of Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators, for example, was a landmark moment in using deception to promote a pretext for going to war. The American people were duped by George H. Bush’s
In conclusion, the blame for Operation Desert Storm was placed on Hussein, whom Bush accused of invading Kuwait and killing innocent babies in incubators; this justification (though false) allowed Bush to win attack Hussein and drive him out of Kuwait. This operation essentially changed the way the U.S. approached issues in the Middle East. Since the attack was successful and Hussein was repulsed, it encouraged future leaders to use military force in the Middle East to obtain dubious objectives. In this manner, Operation Desert Storm set a dangerous precedent. George H. Bush’s brief war against Iraq in 1991 set the stage for a much longer and harsher war not only against Iraq in the wake of 9/11 but also against several other countries as well—a war that continues well into this day and shows no signs of abating or coming to a timely conclusion.

AP. “Mission Accomplished.”

Works Cited
AP. “Mission Accomplished.” 2003. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/decision-points-by-george-w-bush/article1314721/
Bush, George. “Announces War Against Iraq.” Jan 16, 1991. Youtube, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxFlsHiGyYA
Bush, George. “Victory speech,” The New York Times, Mar 7, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/07/us/after-war-president-transcript-president-bush-s-address-end-gulf-war.html
Crabb, Cecil and Kevin Mulcahy. “George Bush’s Management Style and Operation Desert Storm.” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 25.2 (1995): 251-265.
Kellner, Douglas. “Bushspeak and the politics of lying: presidential rhetoric in the ‘war on terror’.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37.4 (2007): 622-645.
Walton, Douglas. “Appeal to pity: A case study of theargumentum ad misericordiam.” Argumentation 9.5 (1995): 769-784.