At two in the morning on August 2, 1990, approximately a hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers crossed into Kuwait with more than two thousand tanks. By mid-morning, the Kuwaiti royal family had fled and Iraqi forces controlled the oil fields holding ten percent of the world's proven petroleum reserves. Saddam Hussein had miscalculated one thing: George H.W. Bush's response. What followed was the last clean American military triumph — a hundred-hour ground war, a left-hook flanking maneuver through the Saudi desert, and a coalition of thirty-four nations built through James Baker's extraordinary diplomacy. And then, thirteen years later, a different Bush launched a different war on the same battlefield — one built on intelligence that was wrong and arguments made in bad faith, producing consequences still unfolding today.
In this narrative military history of America in the Middle East, historian Gerald Thomas Whitaker traces both bookends: George H.W. Bush's Gulf War coalition, the hundred-hour Desert Storm campaign, the decision not to march to Baghdad, the decade of sanctions and no-fly zones, Colin Powell's UN presentation, and the 2003 Iraq invasion that followed. The contrast illuminates the distance American foreign policy traveled in thirteen years — from the careful multilateralism of the Cold War's end to the unilateral overconfidence of the post-9/11 moment.
Inside this Iraq War and Gulf War history:
- The Glaspie meeting — Ambassador April Glaspie's July 25, 1990 conversation with Saddam and the fatal ambiguity that may have greenlighted the Kuwait invasion (Chapter 1)
- Baker's coalition — how Secretary of State Baker secured Soviet support, a 52-47 Senate vote, and thirty-four contributing nations for a war that was genuinely multilateral (Chapter 2)
- The hundred-hour war — Schwarzkopf's left-hook flanking maneuver, 147 American dead, and why the Republican Guard escaped (Chapter 4)
- The decision not to go to Baghdad — Bush and Scowcroft's reasoning, the Shia uprising Saddam suppressed while American troops watched, and the 300,000 Iraqi dead in the marshes (Chapters 5-6)
- The decade of containment — UNSCOM weapons inspections, the Oil-for-Food corruption, Operation Desert Fox, and al-Qaeda's rise (Chapters 9-12)
- Powell's UN presentation — the intelligence failure, the arguments made in bad faith, and how Colin Powell later called it a blot on his record (Chapter 13)
- Bremer's de-Baathification order — how dismantling the Iraqi army created the Sunni insurgency, the Fallujah battles, and Abu Ghraib (Chapters 17-19)
This Iraq War history asks why the quality of decision-making matters — why Bush 41's careful statecraft produced a limited triumph while Bush 43's motivated reasoning produced a strategic catastrophe. The soldiers did not fail in Iraq; the decisions that sent them there and failed to plan for what followed did.
For readers of Bob Woodward's PLAN OF ATTACK and Thomas Ricks's FIASCO.