We paid a price for Saddam’s Kuwait gamble

This week marks the 25th anniversary of a seismic moment in the history of this region. On August 2, 1990, on the orders of president Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi Republican Guard breached the border with Kuwait. Within two days, Kuwait had been overrun, its leadership forced to flee to Saudi Arabia. Soon, Saddam had proclaimed his oil-rich neighbour to be Iraq’s 19th province. It was a relatively swift battle that triggered a whole set of unforeseen circumstances. Indeed, the reverberations of that invasion are still being felt today.

It came as a shock to many. The United States had noticed an Iraqi troop build-up just a week before, but did not imagine Saddam was planning a full invasion. Still licking their wounds from their embarrassing and costly defeat in Vietnam, Americans were reluctant to engage in another fight that was not their own and was far from home. Officially, the US did not want to take sides in what they saw as an inter-Arab conflict and Saddam gambled that Kuwait was not important enough to them to change their mind.

The rest of the world’s attention was distracted by the sense of optimism that accompanied the tail end of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall had already come down and while the official break-up of the Soviet Union was yet to come, there was a palpable sense of a new world order in which peace and prosperity would replace repression and suspicion.

Instead, America’s reluctant decision to respond in support of Kuwait and its other Gulf allies marked the beginning of a quarter-century of military engagement in this region. Iraq’s occupation and plundering of Kuwait led to the creation of the largest military alliance since the Second World War – a 39-country coalition that included the US, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, France and the UK under the banner of Operation Desert Storm. The adventure in Kuwait also led to Saddam’s eventual downfall in the second Gulf War, but not before it gave rise to Al Qaeda whose leader Osama bin Laden cited the continued US military presence in Saudi Arabia as one of the main reasons for the September 11, 2001 attacks. The terror tactics of Al Qaeda have since been adopted by ISIL and its ilk with horrific consequences, and war rages across Syria and Iraq.

Saddam’s great miscalculation – that he could carry off a small, winnable war while the world stood by – had far greater consequences than he, or anyone at the time, could have imagined for Iraq, Kuwait, the region and the global geopolitical balance.