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    Â Â Â  The Gulf War Legacy
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  Baghdad
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  August 1990–February 2003
    Shortly after midnight on August 2, 1990, more than 150,000 Iraqi troops, accompanied by 350 Soviet-built tanks and five hundred armored personnel carriers, swarmed across the northern border of Kuwait. Thirty-five hours later, the last Kuwaiti army unit had either surrendered or been driven south across the border into Saudi Arabia. The emir of Kuwait and the al Sabah family barely escaped with their lives. Iraqi armored units crossed the Kuwait-Saudi border to occupy the city of Khafji on the coast highway. If American and British intelligence had been half as good as it was thought to be, this disaster might never have happened.
    The Iraqi invasion of tiny oil-rich Kuwait by an army that had been pummeled and punished for eight years in the Iran-Iraq War came as a complete surprise to everyone. A CIA officer I have known since my days on Ronald Reagan’s NSC staff told me afterward that his warnings about an Iraqi buildup along the Kuwaiti frontier in July had been set aside because the administration of George H. W. Bush was preoccupied by the events surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. A military officer with whom I had served put it differently: “Given their losses in the war with Iran, who would have thought that the Iraqi military could recover in just two years?”
    Whatever the reasons for underestimating and misunderstanding Iraqi capabilities and intentions, Saddam’s attack, which he pretentiously called the “Revolution of August Second,” shocked not onlythe United States but the rest of the world as well. The Saudis, who hadn’t seen it coming either, immediately called for help.
    The United States responded straight away, reinforcing Saudi defenses with U.S. Air Force fighter squadrons, a carrier battle group, and a Marine Expeditionary Unit. By the time Saddam proclaimed Kuwait to be the “nineteenth province of Iraq,” an even bigger buildup—one that would not only defend Saudi Arabia but also evict the Iraqis from Kuwait—was also under way.
    On August 6, 1990, the UN Security Council condemned the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait, and debate in the council began on a resolution authorizing the use of force to expel the invaders. The United States started building what would become a remarkable thirty-eight-nation coalition of more than 700,000 troops from NATO and Arab soldiers from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, even Syria—under the command of an American general, H. Norman Schwarzkopf.
    As the buildup in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf got under way and Saddam threatened to use Western hostages in Iraq as “human shields,” the finger pointing began. Congressional critics of the Bush administration wanted to know how the U.S. could have been so surprised. Blame initially focused on April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, for delivering what some said was a mixed message to the Iraqi foreign ministry.
    Administration spokesmen appearing on the Sunday talking-head TV shows tended to explain Saddam’s motivations as an oil grab. College professors, “Arabologists”, retired diplomats, and archaeologists sat for hours in front of the cameras pontificating on Iraq’s age-old claims to Kuwaiti territory, the wrongs of British imperial rule, and the evils of America’s support for Israel—as if all this somehow explained or justified the Iraqi invasion. Even the environmental lobby managed to get into the debate by insisting that the whole mess was the consequence of America’s dependence on cheap foreign oil.
    What all these accounts failed to grasp was what had been happening inside Iraq from the time the Iran-Iraq War ended on July 21, 1988. The badly battered Iraqi army—primarily Shi’ite and Kurdish conscripts led by Sunni officers—came back from the front to a