This week, 32 years ago, the Gulf War began. On January 17, 1991, after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ignored a deadline for withdrawing from Kuwait, former U. S. President Saddam Hussein ignored a deadline to withdraw from Kuwait, former U. S. President Saddam Hussein Stabbed the Army. Irak. La opening night of the airstrikes, the beginning of what turned out to be a remarkably accurate, coordinated, and well-planned army crusade with a transparent and valid mission: to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, impose consequences on the Iraqi government for an act of rampant aggression, and make sure that Hussein did not have the army’s ability to do something similar in the future.
We know how the war ended. Tactically speaking, it was a great fortune for the US. The US and its coalition allies. Although Iraq had the largest army in the Middle East at the time, Baghdad’s army was blown to pieces in a matter of weeks. Iraqi armored columns were easy prey for the Americans. fighters and bombers, which neutralized the cars accurately. The Iraqis lost at least 2,000 tanks, 1,500 armored personnel carriers and tens of thousands of soldiers in about two and a half months of fighting. Diplomatically, the Bush leadership has assembled a broad coalition of countries, adding adversaries such as Syria and the Soviet Union, to join the crusade. The UN Security Council approved the army’s action two months before the crusade began, offering Washington a foolproof legal framework to use force if Hussein refused to comply.
By early April 1991, the war was over. The Iraqi army was seriously warped, and Hussein still had no options to sign an incredibly disadvantageous ceasefire agreement: the terms included strict limitations on the weapons systems the Iraqi army could possess, where Iraqi troops could operate in the country and put the Iraqis in. The government is struggling for $52 billion in war reparations that Baghdad paid for despite everything last year.
However, the Gulf War was also notable for some other reason: it ushered in an era in which U. S. military action was not a major contributor. The U. S. government in Iraq has become the norm rather than the exception. All U. S. presidents UUfrom George H. W. Since then, Bush has engaged in some form of military activity within Iraq’s borders.
Former President Bill Clinton, who succeeded Bush as president, inherited two U. S. -imposed no-fly zones in Iraq, one in the Kurdish-controlled north of the country and the other in the south. Hussein, who never believed those spaces were legitimate, put them to the test, forcing U. S. planes patrolling those spaces to interact in minor skirmishes with Iraqi forces. Clinton hit Iraqi army installations several times during her presidency in the first five months alone, when U. S. Navy ships fired 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraqi intelligence in retaliation for an Iraqi assassination plot opposed to Bush. Three years later, in 1996, Clinton legalized a series of airstrikes to punish Hussein for sending the Iraqi army into the Kurdish-controlled north. The sustained peak era of airstrikes occurred in December 1998, when Clinton and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair bombed suspected Iraqi facilities with weapons of mass destruction after Baghdad ended its cooperation with U. N. weapons inspectors.
George W. Bush’s idea that Clinton’s technique for Iraq was fragmentary and cowardly. Some of Bush’s advisers, in addition to former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, also served in his father’s administration. the second, Wolfowitz, the idea that Hussein deserves to have been overthrown in the Gulf War; As Robert Draper of the New York Times Magazine wrote in his book Starting a War, Wolfowitz proposed a plan that would have established an armed and U. S. -protected Iraqi government in southern Iraq to undermine Hussein’s authority.
Wolfowitz’s dream of getting rid of Hussein came true after the terrorist attacks of September 11, when the Bush leadership went into a large-scale press to convince the American public that the option of Iraq delivering weapons of mass destruction to terrorists was too wonderful for Hussein. of course, it had nothing to do with September 11, and the functions of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction turned out to be virtually non-existent. The result: an ultra-fast crusade to topple the Iraqi strongman, but a profession of U. S. troops that has lasted for years amid a vacuum of forces and a sectarian civil war.
If Clinton inherited a U. S. project. A U. S. military candidate in Iraq in his time, former President Barack Obama inherited an even bigger one: a U. S. national counterinsurgency crusade. UU. de 144,000 U. S. troops in major Iraqi cities and towns. Obama believed that the Bush-era regime change operation was a totally unnecessary and unjustifiable war of choice, preceded by scaremongering and false intelligence. Even so, it took Obama 3 years to withdraw all U. S. forces from Iraq, and he completed the task in December 2011.
Three years later, the U. S. The U. S. introduced the military operation, this time to repel the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), while smoothly overrunning the trained, equipped and corrupt U. S. military. U. S. in the north and west of the country. The lengthy air campaign, combined with floor operations in coordination with Iranian-linked militias that killed U. S. troops years earlier, would continue under the Trump administration.
Today, about 2,000 U. S. troops remain in Iraq with an endless project to exercise the Iraqi army and lend a hand in Baghdad’s anti-ISIS operations. If Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani complied with his wish, those troops would remain indefinitely.
We regard the Gulf War as an undeniable good fortune in the history of the U. S. military. In terms of mission, that’s a fair description. The war paved the way for 3 consecutive decades of US military action in the Arab-majority country, and who knows, 3 more decades.
Daniel R. DePetris is a member of Defense Priorities and a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
The perspectives expressed in this article are those of the author.
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