The Gulf War, 1990–1991: Desert Storm and the 100-hour war

By Khalid Al-Harbi

At 2 a.m. on 2 August 1990, more than 100,000 Iraqi troops rolled across the border into Kuwait. By nightfall, the small, oil-rich emirate had ceased to exist as a sovereign state — annexed, looted and renamed Iraq’s “19th province”. What followed was the defining war of the post-Cold War moment: a United Nations-authorised coalition of some 35 nations that contributed forces, and 39 that contributed in all, assembled the largest military deployment since the Second World War, drove Iraq out of Kuwait in a 100-hour ground campaign, and then stopped — leaving Saddam Hussein in power, and the Middle East with a decade of sanctions, no-fly zones and unfinished business. The Gulf War of 1990–1991 was a triumph of international law and coalition warfare, and a warning that winning a war is not the same as settling one.

Origins: debt, oil and an old grievance

The invasion of Kuwait did not come from nowhere. Iraq emerged from its eight-year war with Iran (1980–1988) victorious in the narrow sense that it had survived, but ruined: the war had cost an estimated 200,000 Iraqi lives and left Iraq with roughly $80 billion in foreign debt, including tens of billions borrowed from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s dictator since 1979, expected those debts to be forgiven as the price of having fought Iran on behalf of the Arab world. Kuwait refused. Worse, from Baghdad’s perspective, Kuwait was overproducing oil within OPEC, driving down the price per barrel and strangling Iraq’s only path to revenue. Saddam accused Kuwait of slant-drilling across the border into Iraq’s share of the Rumaila oil field, stealing billions of dollars’ worth of Iraqi oil — a charge Kuwait denied, but one that became a staple of Iraqi propaganda.

Beneath the economics lay history. Iraq had claimed Kuwait since the Ottoman era: Kuwait had been administered as part of the Ottoman province of Basra, and Iraqi nationalists argued that the emirate was an artificial creation of British imperial map-making, separated from Iraq by a 1922 border agreement that Baghdad had never truly accepted. Britain, which had protected Kuwait since 1899, formalised its independence in 1961; Iraq immediately threatened invasion, and British troops were rushed to the border to deter it. In 1963, Iraq formally recognised Kuwaiti sovereignty, but the claim never died in Ba’athist ideology. Saddam, who had built his regime on a cult of Iraqi greatness and a vast military machine, saw Kuwait’s wealth — some 10 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, a sovereign wealth fund worth tens of billions, and a coastline that would give landlocked Iraqi power a real outlet to the Gulf — as the answer to all his problems at once.

The diplomacy of the summer of 1990 was a study in miscalculation. On 25 July, a week before the invasion, Saddam summoned the American ambassador, April Glaspie, and complained at length about Kuwait and the American naval presence in the Gulf. Glaspie replied that the United States had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait” — words that Saddam read, reasonably or not, as a green light. Historians still debate whether Glaspie was misunderstood, mistranslated or simply careless, but her phrasing became one of the most dissected sentences of modern diplomacy. Arab mediation also failed: a meeting between Iraq and Kuwait in Jeddah on 1 August broke down within hours. The next morning, the tanks moved.

The invasion: Kuwait falls in a day

The Iraqi assault was overwhelming. Three Republican Guard divisions — the elite of the Iraqi army, battle-hardened from the Iran war — crossed the border in the early hours of 2 August, supported by special forces landed by helicopter on Kuwait City. The Kuwaiti army, numbering around 20,000, fought bravely at the Mutla Ridge and around the emir’s palace, but it was outnumbered roughly five to one and collapsed within hours. By the evening of 2 August, Iraq controlled Kuwait City; within days, it controlled the whole country. The emir, Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, fled to Saudi Arabia, where he established a government-in-exile in Taif. Tens of thousands of Kuwaitis fled south; those who remained faced a brutal occupation — arrests, torture, summary executions, systematic looting of everything from gold reserves to hospital equipment, and the seizure of the country’s oil infrastructure.

On 8 August, Iraq formally annexed Kuwait, declaring it the “19th province” of Iraq and erasing its name from the map. The annexation was the war’s decisive political error: it transformed a border dispute into a war of conquest, and made it impossible for any mediator to propose a face-saving compromise. Saddam compounded the error by taking thousands of Western and Asian foreign nationals hostage, parading some of them on television — a tactic that horrified world opinion and hardened the resolve of the governments whose citizens were held. The United Nations Security Council reacted with extraordinary speed. On the day of the invasion, Resolution 660 demanded Iraq’s immediate and unconditional withdrawal. On 6 August, Resolution 661 imposed comprehensive economic sanctions — a near-total trade embargo. And on 29 November, after months of diplomacy had failed, Resolution 678 authorised member states to use “all necessary means” to liberate Kuwait if Iraq had not withdrawn by 15 January 1991. It was the first time the Security Council had authorised war against a member state since Korea in 1950, and it passed with the support — or at least the acquiescence — of the Soviet Union, which was then collapsing inward and unwilling to shield its old client.

Desert Shield: the greatest deployment since 1945

Even before the UN deadline, the coalition was assembling. On 7 August 1990, President George H. W. Bush ordered the deployment of American forces to Saudi Arabia — Operation Desert Shield — after the Saudi king, Fahd, accepted the American offer of protection. The stakes were obvious: if Iraq continued south into Saudi Arabia, it would control nearly half the world’s oil reserves. The deployment became the largest American military movement since the Second World War: ultimately some 697,000 American troops would serve in the Gulf theatre, alongside roughly 100,000 Saudi troops, 45,000 British, 35,000 Egyptian, 20,000 Syrian, 19,000 French and contingents from dozens of other nations. In all, 35 nations contributed military forces, and 39 contributed forces, funds or other support — including, remarkably, Syria, which sent troops to fight alongside the Americans against a fellow Ba’athist regime, and the Soviet Union, which provided political backing at the UN. Japan and Germany, barred by their constitutions from sending combat troops, contributed billions of dollars: in the end, allies covered nearly $54 billion of the war’s estimated $61 billion incremental cost to the United States.

The coalition was held together by a single, disciplined war aim: the liberation of Kuwait, nothing more. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, built it through relentless diplomacy — Baker visited dozens of capitals, and the administration secured UN resolutions, Arab League backing, and a crucial Soviet acquiescence. The coalition’s Arab members mattered enormously: Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad gave the war Arab legitimacy, without which it would have been painted as a Western crusade. But the coalition was also fragile: it depended on keeping Israel out — if Israel had retaliated against Iraqi Scud missile attacks on Tel Aviv, the Arab members would have walked out — and on keeping the war’s aims limited. Both constraints would shape the war’s ending.

For five months, while diplomats talked and the deadline approached, the desert filled with steel. American armour poured into Saudi ports; air wings assembled at bases across the Gulf; warships massed in the Red Sea and the Gulf itself. Iraq, for its part, dug in: some 500,000 Iraqi troops entrenched along the Kuwait-Saudi border in massive defensive fortifications, minefields and the so-called “Saddam Line”. Saddam called it the “mother of all battles” and promised to turn the coalition’s victory into a bloodbath. The world braced for a grinding war of attrition. It got something else entirely.

Desert Storm: the air war

At 2:38 a.m. local time on 17 January 1991 — 15 January had passed without an Iraqi withdrawal — the air war began. Operation Desert Storm opened with a wave of strikes designed to blind Iraq: stealth aircraft slipped past air defences to hit command centres in Baghdad, cruise missiles launched from warships in the Gulf slammed into communications nodes, and electronic warfare aircraft jammed Iraq’s radar networks. Within hours, the coalition owned the sky. The air campaign that followed lasted 38 days and flew more than 100,000 sorties, dropping tens of thousands of tons of ordnance on Iraqi command-and-control centres, airfields, bridges, ammunition depots, and the Republican Guard divisions dug in around Kuwait.

The air war was also a television war, and it changed how the world saw conflict. For the first time, audiences watched precision-guided munitions fly down air shafts and through bunker doors in real time, on live satellite broadcasts from Baghdad and Riyadh. The Pentagon briefed the war with video clips of “smart bombs”, and the technology — stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs — became the war’s signature. The reality was more complicated: only a minority of munitions were precision-guided, and the bombing of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure — power stations, water treatment plants, bridges — devastated the country’s ability to sustain daily life. A UN report in March 1991 described the effect on Iraq as “near apocalyptic”, warning that the bombing had reduced the country toward a “pre-industrial age”. The controversy over the bombing’s true accuracy and civilian cost would outlast the war itself.

Iraq’s counter-attacks were limited and largely symbolic. From 18 January onward, Iraq fired Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia — around 88 in total — hoping to provoke an Israeli retaliation that would shatter the coalition. Israel, under intense American pressure and supplied with American Patriot missile batteries, absorbed the attacks without retaliating: one of the most consequential acts of restraint in modern military history. The Scuds killed a handful of Israelis and Saudis and terrorised civilian populations, but they achieved nothing strategically. In the Gulf itself, Iraqi forces attempted one offensive, the Battle of Khafji (29 January–1 February), seizing the Saudi border town before being driven out with heavy losses by coalition air power and Saudi and Qatari ground forces. It was the war’s only significant Iraqi ground success, and it lasted three days.

The ground war: 100 hours

At 4 a.m. on 24 February 1991, the ground offensive began. What followed was one of the most lopsided land campaigns in modern warfare. The coalition’s plan, designed by General Norman Schwarzkopf, combined a frontal assault into Kuwait by American marines and Arab forces with a vast flanking manoeuvre — the famous “left hook” — in which the American VII Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps swung hundreds of kilometres west through the Iraqi desert, then turned east to cut off the Iraqi army’s escape. French and British armoured divisions guarded the western flank; Egyptian and Syrian forces advanced into Kuwait alongside Saudi and Kuwaiti troops.

The Iraqi army, starved of air cover, battered by five weeks of bombing, and demoralised by desertion and surrender, collapsed. Coalition forces took tens of thousands of prisoners — more than 80,000 Iraqis surrendered, many of them to journalists, drones, or simply to the first soldiers they encountered. The largest tank battle of the war, the Battle of 73 Easting (26 February), saw a single American cavalry regiment destroy an entire Iraqi Republican Guard brigade in a sandstorm, losing no tanks of its own. The much-feared “Saddam Line” was breached in hours. By 27 February, Kuwait City was liberated; the emir’s flag flew again over the capital, and Baghdad Radio announced that Iraq would comply with UN resolutions.

The war’s most infamous episode came on the road out of Kuwait. On the night of 26–27 February, Iraqi forces retreating north toward Basra along Highway 80 — the road from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border — were caught in a massive coalition air and ground assault. Hundreds of vehicles were destroyed in a miles-long column of burning wreckage that became known as the “Highway of Death”. Photographs of the charred convoy circled the world and became the war’s most enduring and debated image. The coalition maintained that the convoy was a legitimate military target — retreating combat forces carrying looted Kuwaiti property — and that the attack was lawful. Critics argued that the scale of the killing, against an enemy already in retreat, was disproportionate. The controversy fed directly into the decision, taken the next day, to stop the war.

The ceasefire: why the coalition stopped

On 27 February 1991, President Bush declared that Kuwait had been liberated and that coalition forces would suspend offensive operations at midnight, 100 hours after the ground war began. The decision — the most consequential and most debated of the war — was driven by the coalition’s own limits. The UN mandate authorised the liberation of Kuwait, not the conquest of Iraq. The Arab coalition members had no appetite for occupying Baghdad. The images from the Highway of Death were turning world opinion. And Bush and his advisers believed that Saddam’s regime, humiliated and shattered, would fall on its own — that the Iraqi army, or the Iraqi people, would remove him. The formal ceasefire followed: on 2 March, the Security Council adopted Resolution 686 setting the terms, and on 3 April, Resolution 687 — the “mother of all resolutions” — imposed the formal peace: Iraq accepted the Kuwait border, renounced weapons of mass destruction, submitted to weapons inspections, and agreed to pay reparations.

The gamble failed. Saddam survived. In March 1991, encouraged by American rhetoric about liberation, Kurds in the north and Shia in the south rose against the regime — and were crushed, brutally, by the Republican Guard divisions that had escaped destruction in the south. The United States, unwilling to be drawn into Iraq’s civil war, stood by as the uprisings were drowned in blood. Only after the scale of the catastrophe became undeniable did the coalition act: in April, the US, Britain and France imposed a no-fly zone over northern Iraq and launched Operation Provide Comfort to protect the Kurdish refugees fleeing into the mountains of Turkey, where thousands were dying of cold and hunger. A southern no-fly zone followed in 1992. Iraq was left truncated, sanctioned and policed — but ruled by the same dictator who had started the war.

Key figures

Saddam Hussein — Iraq’s dictator, architect of the invasion, and the war’s great loser who survived. His misreading of the world — that the coalition would fracture, that America lacked stomach, that Kuwait could be kept — cost Iraq a decade of ruin. He remained in power until the 2003 invasion toppled him.

George H. W. Bush — the American president who built the coalition and defined its limited aim. His restraint in stopping the war — and his failure to anticipate Saddam’s survival — shaped his legacy and his son’s.

Norman Schwarzkopf — the coalition’s commander, architect of the “left hook”, whose flamboyant briefings made him the war’s public face. He retired soon after, uneasy about how the war had ended.

Colin Powell — chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, whose doctrine of overwhelming force and clear political aims shaped the campaign. The “Powell Doctrine” became the American military’s lesson from the war.

James Baker — secretary of state, whose globe-spanning diplomacy assembled the coalition and secured Soviet acquiescence at the UN.

Margaret Thatcher — the British prime minister in her final months in office, who stiffened Bush’s resolve in their famous exchange: “Don’t go wobbly on me, George.”

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia — whose decision to invite American troops onto Saudi soil made the coalition possible — and whose invitation to foreign forces radicalised a generation of Islamists, including Osama bin Laden.

Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah — Kuwait’s emir, who led the government-in-exile and returned to a liberated but devastated country.

Aftermath: sanctions, inspections and the long decade

The Gulf War did not end in 1991; it settled into a grinding decade of containment. The sanctions imposed by Resolution 661 remained in force after the war, and Resolution 687 tied their lifting to Iraq’s verified disarmament. The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), created to find and destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, spent seven years in a cat-and-mouse game with Iraqi officials, uncovering a far larger chemical, biological and nuclear programme than anyone had expected — and fuelling a permanent crisis over access, concealment and inspection. Iraq’s refusal to cooperate led to repeated confrontations, including the 1998 bombing campaign Operation Desert Fox, and ultimately to the false certainty, in 2002–2003, that Iraq still possessed weapons it had in fact destroyed. The inspectors’ story is one of the war’s great ironies: the disarmament regime worked, but nobody believed it had.

The human cost of the sanctions regime became one of the most contested moral questions of the decade. The embargo, combined with the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure during the bombing, crippled the country’s water, power and health systems. UNICEF and other agencies reported sharply rising child mortality; the exact toll remains bitterly disputed, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. In 1995, the Security Council created the Oil-for-Food Programme (Resolution 986), allowing Iraq to sell limited quantities of oil to buy food and medicine. The programme fed millions, but it also became one of the largest corruption scandals in UN history, as Saddam’s regime extracted kickbacks and smuggled oil outside the programme. The sanctions debate split the world: supporters argued that sanctions were the peaceful alternative to war and that Saddam, not the UN, chose to let his people suffer; critics argued that a decade of embargo punished ordinary Iraqis while entrenching the regime it was meant to weaken.

Kuwait, meanwhile, rebuilt with astonishing speed. The retreating Iraqis had set fire to more than 600 oil wells, creating an environmental catastrophe — burning wells that blotted out the sun, lakes of spilled oil, and smoke visible from space. The fires, extinguished over nine months by international firefighting teams, and the oil spill, one of the largest in history, left a lasting ecological scar. The emir returned, the country’s infrastructure was rebuilt, and Kuwait’s sovereign wealth — much of it held abroad, out of Saddam’s reach — financed the recovery. But the occupation left deep wounds: hundreds of Kuwaitis had been killed or disappeared, and the country’s politics were marked for years by the trauma of betrayal and liberation.

Legacy: the war that made the modern Middle East

The Gulf War’s legacy runs in several directions at once. Militarily, it was a revolution: the precision weapons, stealth aircraft, satellite navigation and real-time battlefield surveillance demonstrated in Desert Storm became the template for American warfare for the next three decades, from Kosovo to Iraq in 2003. The “Powell Doctrine” — overwhelming force, clear objectives, public support, an exit strategy — became the American military’s gold standard, even as later wars would show how hard those conditions are to meet. Politically, the war was the high-water mark of the “new world order” Bush proclaimed: a world in which the UN Security Council, freed from Cold War deadlock, could authorise force against aggression. That vision would survive barely a decade, undone by Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and Iraq itself.

For the Middle East, the war’s consequences were profound and mostly unintended. The American military presence in Saudi Arabia, established to defend the kingdom, became the central grievance of Osama bin Laden, who had offered his own fighters to defend the kingdom and was enraged when the king chose American troops instead. Bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war against the United States cited the presence of American forces in the land of the holy mosques as its primary justification. The war also set the stage for the 2003 invasion: the unresolved disarmament question, the sanctions regime, the no-fly zones and the American conviction that Saddam could never be trusted all flowed directly from the decision to stop in 1991. The war that ended in 100 hours produced the war that began twelve years later.

The casualty ledger is itself a study in asymmetry. The coalition lost 292 soldiers killed, including 148 Americans (35 of them to friendly fire), 47 British, 24 Saudi, 11 Egyptian and 9 French, among others; 92 Senegalese soldiers died in an aircraft accident. Iraqi military deaths are estimated at between 20,000 and 35,000, with other estimates ranging far higher; the true number is unknown, and Iraq has never published one. Kuwaiti civilian deaths during the occupation are estimated in the thousands. The contrast — a near-bloodless victory for one side, devastation for the other — shaped the war’s reputation as a “clean” war, a reputation the Highway of Death and the sanctions decade would steadily erode.

Finally, the Gulf War changed the economics of war itself. The coalition’s cost-sharing — allies covering nearly all of the American incremental cost — was unprecedented, and it has never been repeated at that scale. The war was, in a sense, the last war that paid for itself through allied contributions; every American war since has been financed on the national credit card. In that, as in so much else, the Gulf War looks now like the end of an era rather than the beginning of one: the last war of the Cold War order, fought with Cold War institutions, before the world moved on.

Timeline

• 1980–1988 — The Iran-Iraq War leaves Iraq victorious but ruined, with roughly $80 billion in debt.
• 25 July 1990 — Saddam meets US Ambassador April Glaspie, whose “no opinion” remark he reads as a green light.
• 1 August 1990 — Iraqi-Kuwaiti talks in Jeddah collapse.
• 2 August 1990 — Iraq invades Kuwait. UN Resolution 660 demands immediate withdrawal.
• 6 August 1990 — UN Resolution 661 imposes comprehensive sanctions.
• 7 August 1990 — Operation Desert Shield begins: US forces deploy to Saudi Arabia.
• 8 August 1990 — Iraq formally annexes Kuwait as its “19th province”.
• 29 November 1990 — UN Resolution 678 authorises “all necessary means” after 15 January 1991.
• 15 January 1991 — The UN deadline passes; Iraq has not withdrawn.
• 17 January 1991 — Operation Desert Storm begins with a massive air campaign.
• 29 January–1 February 1991 — The Battle of Khafji: Iraq’s only ground offensive is repelled.
• 24 February 1991 — The ground offensive begins; the “left hook” swings through the western desert.
• 26 February 1991 — The Battle of 73 Easting; the Highway of Death.
• 27 February 1991 — Kuwait City liberated; Bush announces the suspension of offensive operations.
• 28 February 1991 — The ceasefire takes effect, 100 hours after the ground war began.
• March 1991 — Kurdish and Shia uprisings against Saddam are crushed.
• 3 April 1991 — UN Resolution 687 imposes the formal peace: disarmament, inspections, reparations.
• April 1991 — Northern no-fly zone and Operation Provide Comfort protect Kurdish refugees.
• 1995 — Resolution 986 creates the Oil-for-Food Programme.
• 1998 — Operation Desert Fox bombs Iraq after UNSCOM inspectors are expelled.
• 2003 — The United States and Britain invade Iraq, ending the unresolved confrontation that began in 1991.

Sources and further reading

• Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (Princeton University Press, 1993) — the standard scholarly history.
• US Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress (1992) — the Pentagon’s official account.
• US Army Center of Military History, The Whirlwind War: The United States Army in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm (Frank N. Schubert and Theresa L. Kraus, eds.).
• United Nations Security Council Resolutions 660, 661, 678, 686, 687 and 986 (1990–1995) — digitised at digitallibrary.un.org.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Persian Gulf War” — britannica.com.
• Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero (Bantam, 1992) — the coalition commander’s memoir.
• Colin Powell, My American Journey (Random House, 1995).
• George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (Knopf, 1998) — the president and his national security adviser on the war’s decisions.
• Sarah Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (I.B. Tauris, 1999) — on the sanctions decade.
• Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf (eds.), The Gulf War Reader (Times Books, 1991) — contemporary documents and debate.

The legacy