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Middle East Review of International Affairs
An Essay on Arab Lessons from the 1991 Kuwait Crisis and War
by Barry Rubin
*
Editor's Summary
For a long time after the 1991 war over Kuwait, that event seemed to mark a turning point in the region, along with such contemporary developments as the Soviet Union's collapse, the Cold War's end, and the Madrid conference's commencement of direct Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. A decade after the fighting, however, the changes seem to have been more limited or perhaps relatively temporary ones. This article tries to assess what has and has not changed in the Middle East during the decade since the Kuwait crisis.
How did the 1990-1991 Kuwait crisis and the ensuing war affect Arab politics and polities during the decade that followed?
Addressing this question during the years between 1991 and 2000 might well have produced an analysis seeing that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and subsequent defeat--along with several other contemporaneous events--as a turning point in Middle Eastern history. Those additional developments included the Soviet Union's collapse, the Cold War's end, and the emergence of the United States as the world's sole superpower.
By seizing and annexing Kuwait, Iraq had shown a disregard for its neighbors' sovereignty so great that it provoked the near-unanimous condemnation of Arab states to the point that they backed a war to expel its presence. Moreover, they allied with the non-Arab (and often harshly criticized) United States in this conflict. Egypt and Syria sent troops, and the Arab world endorsed tough sanctions against the Iraqi regime. Each of these steps was unprecedented.
Full PDF Document, 13 pages, 75kB
Endnotes:
Note *: Barry Rubin is Deputy Director of the BESA Center for Strategic Studies and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA). His books include Cauldron of Turmoil; Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran; Armed Forces of the Middle East; Revolutionaries and Reformers: Islamist Movements in the Middle East; The Region at the Center of the World: The Contemporary Persian Gulf; Iraq's Road to War, and The Israel-Arab Reader.Back