What if the first Gulf War never happened?

Something totally random for you

Because we could all probably use a palate cleanser, I thought it would be a good week to tackle an alternate history question recently suggested by a reader: What if the first Gulf War never happened?

The 1991 use of force authorization was controversial at the time, passing 52-47 in the Senate and 250-183 in the House, but it became uncontroversial in retrospect because the military campaign went so smoothly. Opponents warned of a Vietnam-esque quagmire, which the George H.W. Bush administration avoided. They instead fought a splendid little war, kicking Iraqi forces out of Kuwait without too much trouble and rapidly destroying much of the Iraqi military. And then, precisely in order to avoid the quagmire skeptics worried about, the war concluded with Saddam Hussein accepting the terms of Security Council Resolution 686, swearing off claims to Kuwaiti territory and agreeing to pay restitution.

Twelve years later, of course, the United States initiated another war with Iraq — this time one that everyone in retrospect agrees was a mistake, but which had strong bipartisan support at the time.

The Second Gulf War was a mistake, but it’s important to appreciate that the wide support it garnered wasn’t totally without reason. Neither SCR 686, nor the follow-up resolutions related to weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missiles, and treatment of Iraq’s Kurdish minority were self-enforcing. And the Bush vision of a “new world order,” in which a global community of responsible nations would enforce the rules of the road, had not come to pass. Throughout Bill Clinton’s presidency, the United States bore increasing costs in its efforts to maintain various containment policies, seemingly without success. The second war, in other words, was a result of the view that the first war didn’t actually end all that successfully. And if the second war was a mistake, we ought to reconsider our views about the first.

Of course, as with any counterfactual, the question, “What if the war didn’t happen?” hinges in large part on why, in our timeline, it didn’t happen.

The best case scenario

In the late 1980s, Iraq emerged from the Iran-Iraq War significantly in debt to both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, two wealthy countries that had backed Iraq during the conflict, but not in a particularly generous way. Iraq and Kuwait were also mired in a border dispute going back to the Ottoman Empire, and the Iraqi government claimed that Kuwait was cheating on its OPEC quotas and slant drilling across the border into the Rumaila oil field.