War in the Gulf, 1990-91: The Iraq-Kuwait Conflict and Its Implications

The swift onset of the Persian Gulf War took many observers (and many television viewers) by surprise. It had, historians Khadduri and Ghareeb note, been a long time coming, however. Kuwait had been artificially severed from Iraq at the end of British colonial rule in 1921, and Iraq had long been seeking access to Kuwaiti ports on the Gulf that, had it been granted, might have forestalled war. Carefully tracing the history of the 1990-91 conflict, the authors suggest that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait followed a certain logic, but not an inevitable one, and that the Allied powers perhaps should have waited for a peaceful Iraqi withdrawal. Theirs is a controversial reading of history, but one that merits an audience.