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country deeply in debt, with few jobs to offer and a homeland internally at war with itself. The Baath socialist health care, education, and public works programs that had been the regime’s sole appeal for the affections of the average Iraqi had been terminated in the mid-1980s, when the costs of the war spiraled out of control. And now that the troops were home, they learned that rumors they had heard of horrific atrocities in Kurdish and Shi’ite enclaves of the country were actually true.
    Shortly after the Iran-Iraq cease-fire, Saddam sought relief from the billions he owed to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Soviets for the arms he had used against the ayatollah. He tried borrowing more from the international banks, OPEC, the EU, even the Japanese. His diplomats made overtures to the UN and the United States, quietly reminding Washington of the intelligence support the CIA had provided to Iraq when an Iranian victory seemed possible.
    Throughout the war, Saddam had held things together in Iraq by depicting himself as the savior of the nation. He had presented himself to his people and the world as the one person who could keep Iraq from being turned into another Shi’ite theocracy. He told anyone who would listen that he was fighting a regime that tortured Western hostages, hijacked airplanes, and blew up embassies. For eight years, it had worked. Arms and money had flowed into the country from every neighboring state and much of Europe, despite a UN arms embargo for both Iran and Iraq.
    But with the war over, stories of the atrocities committed by the regime began appearing in the Western press. Suddenly, the gratitude was gone, as was Saddam’s rationale for the hardship, rationing, andrepression he had enforced. With mounting debt and a restive, potentially threatening army sitting in the barracks, Saddam looked for a way to keep the army busy and to pay some bills. He found a way to do both in Kuwait.
    Lacking any real human intelligence (HUMINT) from inside Iraq, the U.S. administration knew little of this at the time. Defectors from the regime who made their way to Jordan or Turkey discovered that their accounts of what was going on were widely discounted. One such man who claimed to know that Saddam intended to “sack” Kuwait was dismissed because he was thought to have a “personal agenda.”

    Actually, “sack” may understate what Saddam did to Kuwait. While the UN debated a series of resolutions insisting on Iraqi withdrawal, and as antiwar activists rallied in U.S. cities and European capitals trying to prevent a resort to arms, Saddam stripped Kuwait of everything that could be carried away. Looting of the Kuwaiti treasury, the national museum, mosques, churches, public buildings, businesses, and private homes was so pervasive that U.S. satellites were able to capture images of long truck convoys carrying the booty back to Baghdad.
    Kuwaiti women and young girls were raped, many of them repeatedly—by Iraqi soldiers. At Ali Al Salem airbase, west of Kuwait City, Ali Hassan al-Majid—the head of the Amn Al Khass secret police and the man nicknamed “Chemical Ali” for using nerve gas against the Kurds—set up a torture chamber for any Kuwaiti military officers or government officials caught by the occupiers. Within a matter of three weeks, the only things the Iraqis hadn’t wrecked in Kuwait were the water system, the sanitation system, and the oil-production infrastructure, which Saddam planned to use to help pay down his debt.
    On January 15, 1991, as a third UN deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait was ignored, President George H. W. Bush set a deadline of his own: twenty-four hours. A last-minute appeal from the UN, Russia, and France for Saddam to withdraw passed without action from Baghdad, other than the quiet withdrawal of the last Republican Guard division from Kuwait—an action that went undetected by coalition forces arrayed in