While the world’s attention remained tuned to the war in the Persian Gulf, important changes occurred in the U.S.S.R. Gorbachev faced increasing, and increasingly bold, internal opposition from all sides. His economic reforms had failed utterly, and the Soviet GNP continued to fall through the years 1989–90. Shortages grew worse, and even the old Soviet command structure broke down as the constituent republics, one by one, set up their own economic systems and voted to subordinate the laws of the Soviet Union to local laws. Boris Yeltsin, the Russian leader, resigned from the Communist party and became the acknowledged leader of democratic forces throughout the U.S.S.R. Separatism spread among the republics, with the Baltic states taking the lead in hopes of winning complete independence. At the same time, hard-liners in the KGB, the army, and the Communist party gradually regrouped after the buffetings of previous years and criticized Gorbachev for being too soft on dissent. The middle ground of moderate reformism was disappearing from beneath Gorbachev’s feet. Late in 1990 he began to issue sterner warnings to Yeltsin to cease and desist, and he insisted that the Baltics and other republics submit to his newly drafted union treaty regulating the relationship between them and the Soviet central government. He also won still greater emergency powers for himself as president from the Congress of People’s Deputies.

Westerners were awakened to the likelihood of a crackdown in the U.S.S.R. in December 1990, when Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s reformist friend and a main architect of détente with the West, suddenly resigned as foreign minister and warned of imminent dictatorship in the U.S.S.R. Indeed, no sooner had the Western powers opened the war against Iraq in January 1991 than Soviet security forces entered Vilnius and forcibly evicted Lithuanian patriots from public buildings, at the cost of several lives. Just as in Hungary in 1956, when the Western powers were distracted by the Suez crisis, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the United States was bogged down in Vietnam, the Kremlin took advantage of the Persian Gulf War to order a crackdown on challenges to its empire.

Gorbachev suddenly distanced himself from the UN coalition and began playing a separate game. He would extend his good offices, he said, to persuade Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait and thereby render a ground war unnecessary. His motives might have included any of a number of concerns: to end a war that had become a showcase for high-tech American weapons and thus was magnifying American prestige at the expense of the Soviets; to appease the U.S.S.R.’s own Muslim populations in Central Asia (though they were Turkic peoples and not necessarily in sympathy with Iraq); to reclaim the Soviets’ traditional role as friend of the radical Arab states and advocate for the Palestinians; to save for the U.S.S.R. a seat at the peace conference even though it had contributed no forces and no money to the Allied effort.

Gorbachev’s gambit began on February 15, when Iraq announced its “readiness to deal with” the demand that it evacuate Kuwait. Bush denounced the announcement as a cruel hoax inasmuch as Hussein had known for months the UN conditions and could at any time have chosen to observe them. Gorbachev hailed the announcement, however, and invited the Iraqi foreign minister to Moscow. The Soviet plan called for a withdrawal from Kuwait, in return for which the U.S.S.R. would see that Hussein was spared the terms of the other UN resolutions, including punishment for war crimes and reparations to Kuwait. Gorbachev also promised to work for a Middle East peace conference after the war, thereby linking the Kuwaiti situation to the Palestinian. The Soviets (and Iraqis) were betting that Western publics would lose their stomach for a possibly bloody ground war once Iraq had promised to fulfill their main goal—the liberation of Kuwait. If they won their bet, Hussein would not only survive in power, but his army would be largely intact and he could claim a victory of sorts for having advanced the “Arab cause.” Bush consulted with the Allies and then set a final deadline for unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.

The Soviets and Iraqis then produced yet another plan under which Iraq would withdraw. The linkage to the Palestinians was dropped this time, but a number of other conditions remained that flew in the face of Bush’s demand for “unconditional withdrawal” from Kuwait. Bush’s deliberate policy of channelling all decisions through the UN now paid off. The Soviets called an emergency session of the Security Council and presented their plan as the best chance for peace, but the member states refused to throw out their own resolutions. The alliance held, the Soviet gambit failed, and Gorbachev himself then backed off and expressed support for the UN effort.

The ground war

When the final deadline was passed on February 23, the carefully planned UN ground offensive began at once. Saudi and Kuwaiti forces moved up the coast of the Persian Gulf toward Kuwait city, and U.S. Marines punched through the main Iraqi defenses on the southern Kuwaiti border, while more Marines on board ship feinted at making an amphibious landing to tie down Iraqi reserves. The main thrust came far inland on the desert flank, where American and Anglo-French armoured columns swept around the flank of the Iraqi army and turned eastward through southern Iraq on a line toward Basra. The Iraqi units in Kuwait were trapped in a pocket. The Republican Guards near the Iraqi–Kuwaiti border were engaged and destroyed by Allied tanks and aircraft. Within three days Hussein’s massive army ceased to exist; 100,000 Iraqis had surrendered and tens of thousands more were trying to flee homeward. On February 27 the Allied forces had achieved all their major objectives, and Bush announced a cease-fire to take effect just 100 hours after the ground war had begun. Though Hussein still refused to make the personal confession of failure that Bush desired, the Iraqi government conceded defeat by announcing its willingness to abide by all 12 UN resolutions.

In retrospect, the war was a product of grave miscalculations on both sides. Throughout the 1980s U.S. policy had favored Iraq in its war against Iran and permitted the continued export of strategic materials to Hussein despite repeated indications of his fanaticism and ambition. Hussein’s errors were even more egregious and deadly. In light of the Vietnam War and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979–80, he judged the United States to be unwilling and unable to take up a serious challenge in Asia, even one mounted by a Third World country. Having decided to invade, he threw away his advantage of surprise by stopping in Kuwait instead of sweeping down the gulf coast and conquering Saudi Arabia and the emirates as well. He then waited five months, affording the United States time to mobilize international support and send military forces halfway around the world. Finally, he failed to extend his heavily fortified defense lines westward along the Saudi–Iraqi border.

The war in the Persian Gulf thus proved to be an American and UN victory beyond the most sanguine hopes even of its military designers. The Iraqi military suffered more than 100,000 casualties at a cost to the Allies of some 340 killed; it was the most one-sided major engagement in the history of modern warfare. Kuwait was freed, albeit at the cost of terrible damage, since the Iraqis practiced a scorched-earth policy that included setting ablaze hundreds of oil wells. Above all, the UN had shown itself to be truly united and possessed of the will to back up its resolutions with force. What the Bush administration did not accomplish, however, was the overthrow of Hussein himself. On the advice of General Colin Powell, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Bush decided not to press on to Baghdad or to destroy all Iraq’s Republican Guard units. Hussein proceeded to crush challenges to his authority from the Kurds in northern Iraq and Shīʿite dissidents in the south. In the first instance, Bush was restrained by the interests of Turkey, which also contained a large Kurdish minority. In the latter case, he was restrained by fear that Iran’s Shīʿite regime might try to expand its own reach at Iraq’s expense. U.S. forces did provide humanitarian relief to 1,000,000 Kurdish refugees and enforce no-fly zones to stop Iraqi attacks on civilians, but American policy clearly meant to uphold Iraqi unity so as to preserve the regional balance of power. Bush probably expected Hussein to be overthrown by the Iraqis themselves, but the dictator suppressed a military coup on July 2, 1992, and was still in power long after Bush himself was out of office.