Historical Background
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here for synopsis of the war
On 17 January 1991, at 3 a.m. local time (Baghdad,
Iraq) the combined military forces of some twenty-eight
countries in support of UN Security Council resolutions
began combat air operations in the skies over Iraq. The primary
goal of the UN coalition was the eviction of Iraqi forces from Kuwait,
a country Iraq had invaded five months earlier. The decision to
go to war resulted directly from actions taken over the course of
the preceding five months.
On 2 August 1990, nearly 100,000 Iraqi troops,
led by elite armored divisions, crossed the Iraq-Kuwait
border. Within four hours, the capital of Kuwait—Kuwait
City—was being ransacked by Iraqi troops. Kuwait's small army
could not slow, let alone stop, the Iraqi invasion. Tension had
been building for months between these two Arab neighbors, but the
invasion took most of the world by surprise. American satellite
imagery had been tracking Iraqi troops and tanks moving toward the
Kuwaiti border since 16 July. While concerned, most officials in
the administration of President George
H.W. Bush concluded that the leader of Iraq, President Saddam
Hussein, was trying to intimidate the Emir of Kuwait in a dispute
over oil prices and debt. Most of America's friends in the region
were telling the Bush administration not to worry.
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