The Gulf War: An International History, 1989-1991

Abstract

This dissertation uses the Gulf War of 1991 as a lens through which to explore competing American and Arab visions of sovereignty and order at the dawn of the post-Cold War era. It argues for expanding the aperture of the end of the Cold War beyond a transatlantic frame to encompass the Middle East, demonstrating that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was inextricable from Saddam Hussein’s interpretation of the shifting global balance of power amid the collapse of communism. The George H. W. Bush administration, for its part, construed the Iraqi aggression as the “first test” of U.S.-Soviet relations in a “new world order” predicated on the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Ironically, Bush’s campaign to make Iraq a testing ground for that order inadvertently hastened the creation of new norms and multilateral institutions that undermined the very principles he sought to uphold. The UN sanctions regime—made possible by unprecedented U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the Security Council—triggered unforeseen global economic, migration, and humanitarian crises, laying bare just how ill-suited the multilateral tools designed in 1945 were for the interdependent world of 1990. Desert Storm, fought to restore Kuwaiti statehood, inadvertently gave rise to novel multilateral schemes—an experimental “no-fly zone,” “safe havens” for Kurdish refugees, and an “oil-for-food” program—that undermined Iraqi sovereignty over its airspace, territory, and natural resources in the name of containing Saddam Hussein’s regime. These measures bolstered a new discourse of a “duty to intervene,” presaging the advent of atrocity prevention and the Responsibility to Protect later in the decade. In the end, there was a great deal of novelty to be found in the new world order, but none of that novelty was planned or foreseen.