¹ The analysis presented here draws on a wide range of discussions held during and after the Gulf War. in the United Kingdom, in the United States and the Middle East. I am particularly grateful to the participants in the one-day seminar ‘The Gulf War and International Relations‘ held at the International Relations Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science on 16 June 1992: Falih Abd al-Jabir, Michael Donelan, Lawrence Freedman, Christopher Hill, Efraim Karsh, Ken Matthews, Michael Rustin, Steven Smith, and Paul Taylor. Several publications by them are referred to in subsequent notes.

² Of the multitude of books on the crisis, the following are amongst the most informative and judicious: Freedman, Lawrence and Karsh, Efraim, The Gulf Conflict 1990–1991, Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (London, 1993)Google Scholar; Matthews, KenThe Gulf Conflict and International Relations (London 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bulloch, John and Morris, Harvey, The Origins of the Kuwait Conflict and the International Response (London, 1991)Google Scholar. Freedman and Karsh are especially good on Western decision-making, Matthews is exemplary on the analytic implications for IR.

³ Post-1945 history has several instances of states being annexed by more powerful neighbours, but at the moment at which they became independent: Palestine, partitioned by Israel and Jordan in 1948–9, Western Sahara and East Timor in 1975, Bosnia in 1992. Tibet in 1949–50 was a possible further candidate in that one can assume it would have organized itself to acquire international diplomatic recognition, following the British departure from India in 1947, if a little more time had elapsed.

⁴ Thus the conflicts in Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Cyprus all defied such international resolution.

⁵ For representative views, see Michah Sifry, L. and Cerf, Christopher (eds.), The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Gittings, John (ed.), Beyond the Gulf War, The Middle East and the New World Order (London, 1991); Victoria Brittain (ed.), The Gulf Between Us: Gulf War and Beyond (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Bresheeth, Haim and Yuval-Davis, Nira (eds.), The Gulf War and the New World Order (London, 1991)Google Scholar. Among the most persuasive critics of the war were Noam Chomsky, whose analysis is in both the Sifry and Cerf and the Bresheet and Yuval-Davis volumes, and Regis Debray, ‘La Guerre en proces’, Le Nouvel Observateur, No. 1371, 14–20 Feb. 1991, pp. 41–51.

⁶ On the Islamic dimension, see Gilles Kepel, ‘La carte islamique de Saddam Hussein’, Le Monde, 11 January 1991; Jean-Michel Dumay, ‘La “guerre sainte” comme arme idéologique’, Le Monde, 20–21 January 1991; Halliday, Fred‘The Fractured umma: Islamist Movements, Social Upheaval and the Gulf War’, The Oxford International Review, 2, no. 3 (1991), pp. 28–32Google Scholar; Joffe, George, ‘Middle Eastern Views of the Gulf Conflict and its Aftermath’, Review of International Studies, 19 (1993), pp. 177–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a position opposed to Saddam Hussein from within an Islamic perspective, see Algosaibi, Ghazi, The Gulf Crisis: An Attempt to Understand (London, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁷ On the Islamic opposition to Saddam, see Batatu, Hanna, ‘shici Organisation in Iraq: al-Dacwah al-Islamiyah and al-Mujahidin’, in Cole, Juan and Keddie, Nikki (eds.), Khfism and social Protest (New Haven, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁸ Tibi, Bassam, Conflict and War in the Middle East, 1967–91 (London, 1993), p. 165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Hardy, Roger, Arabia after the Storm: Internal Stability of the Gulf Arab States (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Tetrault, Mary Ann, ‘Kuwait: The Morning After’, Current History, no. 91 (January 1992). pp. 6–10Google Scholar; Halliday, Fred, ‘The Arabian Peninsula in the Aftermath of the Gulf War’, Viertelsjahresberichte (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Bonn) no. 133, September 1993, pp. 297–302Google Scholar.

¹⁰ On post-war arms flows to the area, see Foundation, Saferworld, The Middle East Peace Process and the Arms Trade: A Fatal Contradiction? (Bristol, 1992)Google Scholar; and Sadowski, Yahya, ‘scuds vs. Butter: The Political Economy of Arms Control in the Arab world’, Middle East Report, no. 177 (July/August 1992), pp. 2–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Transcript of the April Glaspie interview in Sifry and Cerf (eds.), The Gulf War Reader, pp. 122–33. The mixed signals contained in this interview lie at the heart of several critiques of US policy, notably Pierre Salinger and Laurent, Eric, Secret Dossier, The Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf War (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

¹² We have no first-hand evidence, written or oral, on Saddam's decision-making and a final judgement would have to wait until any such material is made available, an unlikely eventuality. For a perceptive surmise about Saddam's impulsiveness in invading Iran, see al-Khalil, Samir, The Republic of Fear (London, 1988), pp. 271–2Google Scholar.

¹³ On Bacthist ideology and the role of the Syrian nationalist Al-Husri, Sati in transmitting European fascist and nationalist ideas to the Arab world, see al-Khalil, Republic of Fear, and Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ One indication of this shift in Iraqi thinking after June 1989 comes from the information on arms purchases revealed by the Matrix-Churchill affair: a year of relatively slack demand after the 1988 ceasefire gave way to a much more determined pace of arms procurement in the last part of 1989 and early 1990.

¹⁵ On the calculations and miscalculations of the Kuwaiti royal family, see my interview with opposition leader Ahmad al-Khatib, The Guardian, 19 January 1991.

¹⁶ It was calculated that within a year of the end of the war Iraq had been able to organize a quite effective smuggling trade with its neighbours, including the export, in road tankers, of up to 200,000 barrels of oil a day, and of considerable quantities of fertilizers and cement, especially to Iran. Total income from these exports was in the region of $2 billions, compared to export earnings of $15–20 billions before the war. While greatly reduced, these earnings none the less provided the regime with a basic revenue.

¹⁷ A further argument against the war was that of those Americans who said it was not in the United States' ‘national interest’ to go to war. Whatever its domestic merits this paid scant attention to the international issues involved. For one example, a remarkably silly one, see Graubard, Stephen, Mr Bush's War (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ On revised figures for Iraq casualties see The Independent 5 February 1992, and Heidenrich, John, ‘The Gulf War: How Many Iraqis Died?’, Foreign Policy, 90 (Spring 1993), pp. 108–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. At the time of the war both US and Iraqi officials lent credence to the idea of higher casualties, for opposed political reasons-the former to intimidate Iraq, the latter to emphasize the perfidy of US action.

¹⁹ ‘The Gulf War Revisited: Armchair Generalship’, The Economist, 2 May 1992Google Scholar. On the broader assessment of US military capabilities and the dated character of the ‘hi-tech’ war, I am particularly grateful to Kevin Michaels, MSc student at LSE 1990–1. As Michaels pointed out, the balance of civilian to military technology had shifted dramatically over the past decades: the latest technology was not now that of the military, but that in the civilian field-available in any high street personal computer shop.

²⁰ 308 Scuds hit Iran in that conflict, as against 72 used in the Kuwait war, the former causing the deaths of over 2,000 people. See Rajaee, Farhang (ed.), The Iran-Iraq War: The Politics of Aggression (Gainsville, 1993)Google Scholar.

²¹ Part of the problem was the confusion between launchers and the larger number of missiles. The Military Balance 1989–1990, published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, gave the number of launchers as 36 Scud B with a presumably smaller number of the Abbas and Husayn variety. It later transpired that Iraq had 890 Scud missiles (International Herald Tribune, 26 March 1993).

²² On the arms control regime, see Barton, Rod, ‘Eliminating Strategic Weapons: The Case of Iraq’ Pacific Review, 6 (1993), pp. 11–13Google Scholar.

²³ See Ken Matthews, The Gulf Conflict and International Relations, for further discussion.

²⁴ Communication from the foreign minister of an Arab state who visited Iraq on several occasions during the crisis.

²⁵ The issue of whether the allies did none the less try to kill Saddam by hitting a bunker in which he was present is unclear, but intuition would suggest they did. For one version of such attempts, using a specially designed new 5000 lb bomb, see US News, Triumph without Victory (New York, 1992), pp. 3–6Google Scholar.

²⁶ Or, in an extreme case, that of South African sanctions against land-locked Lesotho in 1986: a week after the sanctions were imposed, a coup removed the offending government in Maseru. Similarly, in 1993 Russia cut off energy to Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine and obtained policy concessions.

²⁷ Wight, Martin, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Wight, Gabrielle and Porter, Brian (London, 1991), p. xvGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ For further discussion, see my forthcoming Rethinking International Relations (London, 1994), chs 1–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ See on this my ‘An Encounter with Fukuyama’, New Left Review, 193 (May-June 1992), pp. 89–107Google Scholar, and Rethinking International Relations, chs 3 and 10.

³⁰ Occasionally framed in terms of the popular, anti-imperialist, character of Bacthism, and the social ‘gains’ it had achieved, this progressivist or stagist argument was more commonly found in an alternative from in references to the ‘feudal’, ‘semi-feudal’, ‘backward’ or ‘tribal’ regimes of Kuwait and its associates. What these latter terms meant, however, was that on some, unspoken scale of historical advance and moral probity, Iraq was somehow more ‘advanced’. A variant was contained in the phrase ‘oil-rich Kuwaitis’, as if having a per capita income of say, $12,000, forefeited one's right to self-determination.

³¹ Warren, Bill, Imperialism Pioneer of Capitalism (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

³² It is here that the analyses of Noam Chomsky, relevant in some other respects, are questionable.

³³ On the liaison between discussion of the war and post-modernism, see Norris, Christopher, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London, 1992)Google Scholar. For an example of German ‘critical theory’ turned to anti-war usage, in the idiom of the Frankfurt School at is worst, see Thielen, Helmut (ed.), Der Krieg der Kopfe: Vom Golfrieg zur neuen Wchordnung (Bad Honnef, 1991)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Enloe, Cynthia‘The Gulf Crisis: Making Feminist Sense of It’, Pacific Research, vol. 3, no. 4 (November 1990), pp. 3–5Google Scholar. On alternative invocations of women's role, ‘saddam Husayn Awards Medals to Women: Says Their role More Important than Men's’, BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Part 4, 7 March 1992Google Scholar.

³⁵ Among the more nuanced examinations of the ethical issues involved, see Walzer, Michael, preface to the second edition of Just and Unjust Wars (New York, 1992)Google Scholar and Matthews, The Gulf Conflict and International Relations, chs 5–7, who are broadly in support of the war; Michael Rustin, ‘Justice and the Gulf War’, and Elliott, Gregory, ‘A Just War? The Left and the Gulf War’, Radical Philosophy, 61 (Summer 1992) pp. 3–13Google Scholar, who elaborate cases against it. For a more one-sided defence of the war in traditional Catholic terms, see Johnson, James Turner and Weigel, George, Just War and the Gulf War (Washington, 1991)Google Scholar. For comparable critiques, see materials in the volumes edited by Sifri and Serf, Gittings, Brittain, and Bresheeth and Yuval-Davis, cited in fn. 5 above.

³⁶ Gowan, Peter, ‘The Gulf War, Iraq and Western Liberalism’, New Left Review, 197 (May-June 1991), pp. 29–70Google Scholar, contains a powerful argument against the primacy of sovereignty and the application of this to the Kuwait crisis. For a defense of the ‘legalist paradigm’ on state sovereignty, but one that permits opposition to this particular war, see Michael Rustin, ‘Justice and the Gulf War’.

³⁷ See the excellent study by Schofield, Richard, The Kuwait-Iraq Boundary Dispute (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

³⁸ It was argued by some critics of the war that any assessment of the popular response to the Iraqi invasion should include the non-Kuwait population as well. That the Kuwaiti regime discriminated against non-Kuwaitis is indisputable, but this is not the same as asserting a general political equivalence of all those within a country at a particular moment: no society in the world would accept that. Certainly Iraq did not, with its brutal treatment of tens of thousands of its own citizens accused of Persian connections and expelled in the early 1980s, and of Egyptian migrant labourers. Iraq's claim to be liberating the non-Kuwaitis may have won support amongst a minority of Palestinians, but its treatment of non-Arab immigrants was swift and brutal, resulting in the expulsion, soon after the invasion, of hundreds of thousands of Asian workers.

³⁹ Waltzer, Just and Unjust Wars, ch. 6.

⁴⁰ For general discussion of this issue, see Higgins, Rosalyn, ‘Intervention and International Law’, in Bull, Hedley (ed.), Intervention in World Politics (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar; Roberts, Adam, ‘Humanitarian War: Military Intervention and Human Rights’, International Affairs, 69 (1993), pp. 429–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ Makiya, Kanan, Cruelty and Silence (London, 1993)Google Scholar and Middle East Watch, Human Rights in Iraq (New Haven, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁴² Taylor, Paul and Groom, A.J.R., The United Nations and the Gulf’ War 1990–91: Back to the Future? (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁴³ See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. xix: ‘But mixed motives are normal also in international politics, and they are normally troubling in wartime only if they make for the expansion or prolongation of the fighting beyond its justifiable limits or if they distort the conduct of the war’. If anything, the less savoury motives of George Bush led him to curtail the war and unwarrantedly narrow its aims.

⁴⁴ It is on this issue that my disagreement with Michael Rustin turns: of course, the motives of Bush included many unsavoury ones, but this fact alone does not preclude a jus ad bellum.

⁴⁵ In all discussion of consequences, the issue of time is important: if, ten years from now, Saddam and his regime have been ousted, and a democratic and peaceful regime established in Iraq, then the war will look rather more acceptable: but these are not judgements we can make now, so we have to base our assessment on what has already happened.

⁴⁶ Roberts, Adam, ‘The Gulf War and the Environment’ The Oxford International Review, 4 (Summer 1993), pp. 13–18Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ On the mutilation of enemy dead by US forces in Vietnam, see Herr, Michael, Dispatches (London, 1979) p. 161Google Scholar. On the starving to death of German POWs after World War II, see Bacque, James, Other Losses (Toronto, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ There are two uncertaintities surrounding the spillage of oil from tankers and pumping stations. First, it is not clear that all of this was a result of deliberate Iraqi action as some may have been the result of allied bombing and/or artillery attacks. Secondly, media coverage was designed to play up the consequences of the slick, implying, wrongly as it turned out, that it would go beyond Bahrain and permanently destroy the Gulfs fish stock. See Joni Seager, ‘Operation Desert Disaster Environmental Costs of the War’, in Bresheeth and Yuval-Davids (eds.), The Gulf War and the New World Order, pp. 235–6.

⁴⁹ During the Indochina war, an estimated 11 million gallons of the defoliant Agent Orange were dumped on South Vietnam, affecting 2 million hectares of forest; 170,000 hectares were also turned into craters. See Korn, Peter, ‘Agent Orange in Vietnam: The Persisting Poison’, The Nation, 8 April 1991, pp. 440–6Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ On this see Matthews, The Gulf Conflict and International Relations, p. 166, and Jackson, Robert‘Dialectical Justice in the Gulf War’, Review of International Studies, 18 (1992), pp. 335–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 349.

⁵¹ On the insurrection, see Falih Abd al-Jabir, ‘Why the Uprising Failed’, al-Khafaji, Issam, ‘state Terror and the Degradation of Politics in Iraq’, Middle East Report, 176 (May-June 1992), pp. 2–21Google Scholar, and Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence.

⁵² Public discussion of the war often appeared to invoke a third dimension of morality, what may be termed jus in nuntio, i.e. the obligation to present facts fully, fairly and accurately and to avoid derogatory, racist, or misleading images of the enemy. A barrage of criticism during and after the war rested upon the charge that allied governments, and the media, had engaged in various forms of propaganda and news control. See for example Kellner, Douglas, The Persian Gulf TV War (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar and Fialka, John, Hotel Warriors: Covering the Gulf War (Washington, 1992)Google Scholar. Postmodernism extended this to identification of hegemonist and other obnoxious discourses vis a vis Iraq. All this may have been true, but it was beside the point: first, because such distortion is an inevitable accompaniment of war and can hardly be adduced as a factor in evaluating its legitimacy; second, because if the allies violated jus in nuntio the Iraqis certainly did so as well.