The Gulf War 1991 – Part 2: The Storm
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. If you'd like to support Conflicted, you can become a patron of the show at patreon.com slash conflicted history podcast. That's conflicted.com slash conflicted.

That's patreon.com slash conflicted history podcast. Another great way to support the show is to just leave a nice review or drop me a line on one of our social media channels. It goes without saying, but I absolutely love hearing from you guys. The kind words and the thoughtful responses I get are always such a huge gust of wind in my sails. And they always make me want to keep writing, pushing, and refining this show just a little bit more every time. So thank you. It really does mean a lot.

Now, with all the housekeeping done, let's get down to business. You are listening to part two of a three-part series on the 1991 Gulf War. Needless to say, if you haven't listened to part one yet, I definitely recommend you check that out before diving into this one. Last episode was relatively short, but we covered a lot of ground. We hopped and skipped and jumped around the 20th century, setting up several plot threads that are going to start intertwining and playing off each other in interesting ways.

If this episode is the what, last episode was most definitely the why. But if you have already listened to part one, Lines in the Sand, then you are right where you need to be. Before we head into the next stage of our story though, I think it might be good to briefly retrace our steps and remind ourselves what happened last time. Last episode began and ended...

with helicopters. We opened on American choppers evacuating Saigon in 1975, and we closed with Iraqi helicopters descending into Kuwait in 1990.

Now, the two scenes were only separated by about 15 years, but in that short time, the world had changed several times over. And nowhere was that change more turbulent than in the nation of Iraq, thrust under the hot lights of the world stage by its fearsome dictator, Saddam Hussein. Back in part one, we spent a lot of time getting to know Saddam. We learned about his rough childhood, rebelliousness,

replete with bullies, beatings, and bare floors. We watched him transform from a streetwise survivor to a ruthless political operator, shimmying up the greased pole that was Iraqi politics and eventually arriving at the summit. But no Saddam origin story would be complete without a retelling of the big, bloody set piece that history remembers as the Ba'ath Party Purge of 1979.

Saddam Hussein had plenty of skeletons in his closet. He also had skeletons in the attic, the basement, and in the shed out back. But the sheer theatricality of the 1979 Ba'ath Party purge would have made Stalin's ghost swoon. In

In July of 79, Saddam gathered all of his political rivals into a conference hall, along with a hapless herd of sycophants, and then, chomping on a cigar and chewing scenery in equal measure, he accused 60 or so people of treason and had them dragged out of the room. And if his unlucky enemies were expecting any light at the end of the tunnel, all they saw was a muzzle flash. 21 of them were denounced as traitors and executed, and in the coming weeks hundreds more followed them into the dirt.

From that moment on, Saddam Hussein was the undisputed leader of Iraq. But the sweet tingle of absolute power would not last long. Saddam's grand plans for Iraqi dominance over the Middle East were derailed by an unexpected revolution in neighboring Iran.

And rather than sit on his hands while the Ayatollah literally called for his head, Saddam chose to go to war. By the winter of 1980, Iraqi and Iranian soldiers were dying by the tens of thousands in a pointless, protracted bloodbath. Eight years later, when the mustard gas cleared and the gun barrels cooled, Iraq's economy was trashed, and Saddam owed billions of dollars to creditors, most notably the wealthy oil states of Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

To finance his war with Iran, Saddam had borrowed heavily from the Gucci sheiks in the Persian Gulf. And when the bill finally came due, he begged them to forgive the debt. But they flatly refused. And in the throes of insolvency, Saddam Hussein became scared, angry, and desperate. He had no cash, no recourse, and no way out.

But he did have one thing: the fourth largest army in the world. In practical terms, Iraq had become the geopolitical equivalent of a starving man with a loaded gun. To borrow an analogy from historian Bernard Treanor, if the bank would not forgive the loans, Saddam was going to rob the bank. Now in Saddam's mind, invading Kuwait seemed like a pretty good plan. He needed money and Kuwait had lots of it.

He had a million-man army, and Kuwait had a handful of glorified mall cops. At the end of the day, it was simple math. Two plus two equals ka-ching. But there was one factor that Hussein grossly underestimated, or at least misinterpreted, and that was the American interest in the Persian Gulf. In the United States, administrations came and went. Democrat one cycle, Republican the next.

But oil was the ultimate bipartisan issue, a foreign policy priority as American as apple pie and twice as sticky. Ever since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt shook hands with the King of Saudi Arabia on Valentine's Day 1945, America had been carefully watching the Middle Eastern oil fields, manipulating what it could and mitigating what it could not. As President Ronald Reagan bluntly put it in October of 1981, quote, "...there is

There is no way that we could stand by and see the Gulf taken over by anyone that would shut off that oil. So when Saddam turned his eyes toward the Kuwaiti border in the summer of 1990, he knew that he would need some kind of green light from the United States, however subtle. Some kind of wink, some kind of nudge that an invasion would not be met with any serious consequences. The Saudis were untouchable, of course, but maybe the Kuwaitis were expendable in American eyes.

U.S. foreign policy was nothing if not ethically flexible, and maybe the Americans, those quote, conspiring bastards, as Saddam put it, would let this one slide. After all, if he was going to take a dip in the deep end, he wanted a clear nod from the lifeguard first.

And from where he was sitting, Saddam had every reason to be optimistic. The United States had been an unofficial patron of Iraq for years. During the war with Iran, they'd supported him, armed him, bankrolled him, even while holding their noses. And with the global landscape fundamentally shifting at the end of the Cold War, now seemed like the perfect time for Iraq to make a play for Kuwait. As one historian recounted, quote,

In his words, quote, End quote.

So when Saddam sat down on July 25th, 1990 with April Glaspie, the US ambassador to Iraq, he did so with the hopes of receiving an under-the-table fist bump to settle his grievances with Kuwait without interference from the US. But as we know, Saddam had severely miscalculated.

Ambassador Glaspie later claimed that during their two-hour conversation, she drew a quote, line in the sand for Saddam, that she clearly articulated the fact that America would not abide any kind of threat to its interest in the region. That is not what Saddam heard, or at

or at least not what he chose to hear. In retrospect, Glaspy's comment that the US had "no opinion" on Arab-Arab conflicts was exactly the kind of frothy, noncommittal rhetoric that could leave a crack in the door, a crack that Saddam believed he could fit an entire army through. Both April Glaspy and Saddam Hussein may have been conversing in Arabic, but they were speaking entirely different political languages.

And despite the flogging she later received in the press, Glaspy's handling of the situation had been fundamentally routine, even appropriate. As another U.S. ambassador said later in her defense, quote, She wouldn't have said that, nor would I, neither would any diplomat, end quote.

Nevertheless, one historian wrote, quote, those words essentially ended her career. Because one week later, on August 2nd, 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait. And that, folks, brings us right back up to speed. In today's episode, we're going to pick things up right where we left off.

We'll explore the immediate fallout of the invasion, the international response, and what it was like for everyday people caught in the middle. We'll also be expanding our cast a bit. Last episode was definitely the Saddam show, but this time we'll be meeting some brand new characters that are going to have a big impact on our story going forward. Needless to say, I am very excited to share this one with you, and I hope you enjoy it.

So, without further ado, let's get started. Welcome to the Gulf War 1991, Part 2, The Storm.

It's the morning of August 2nd, 1990. We're about 35,000 feet in the air, in the cool, quiet cabin of a Boeing 747. British Airways Flight 149 The previous evening, Flight 149 had taken off from London's Heathrow Airport, bound for its final destination of Kuala Lumpur. As the plane roared off the tarmac, the 367 passengers aboard tightened their seatbelts, relaxed their legs, and settled in for a long flight.

Cheerful stewardesses in blue pinstripe skirts glided up and down the aisles, serving cold drinks and salty snacks. And about six hours later, around 4 a.m., some of the sleepy passengers woke up to a gentle ping from the intercom and a comforting voice from the cockpit.

The captain, a man named Richard Brunyate, announced that the plane would be landing soon for a brief refueling stop. After all, you can't make it all the way from London to Malaysia on a single tank of jet fuel. Captain Brunyate instructed the passengers to fasten their seatbelts, put their tray tables in the upright position, and prepare for landing. They

They were beginning their descent into Kuwait International Airport. And at 4.13 a.m., the 747 touched down onto the runway. Now, on a normal day, the airport in Kuwait City was a bustling hive of international travel. But as the passengers of Flight 149 rubbed sleep from their eyes and looked out the portholes,

they noticed something kind of creepy. The airport was completely empty. Not only was British Airways Flight 149 the only plane on the tarmac, the terminal looked deserted. Most of the passengers chose to remain on the plane while it refueled, but a few disembarked to stretch their legs. And wandering through the empty terminal like kids in a haunted house, they stumbled upon a chilling sight. On a board listing departures and arrivals written

written in dreadful red letters was the same word repeated over and over again.

Flight 149 was the only arrival into Kuwait Airport that morning. Clearly, those other flights knew something that they did not. Back on the plane, some passengers noticed that the Kuwaiti cleaning crews who'd come on board to tidy up the cabin were nervous and whispering in low voices. As one passenger named John Chappell Jr., just a teenager at the time, remembered, quote,

These guys did not want to be on the plane. They weren't doing the job properly and couldn't do it fast enough. I thought, this is all a bit odd. And just a few seconds later, the mystery of the deserted airport was solved. Three fighter jets screamed out of the dark, dropping bombs onto the runway and engulfing the tarmac in flame. The cabin erupted in blind panic. One passenger named Edward Hammett remembered, quote,

The next thing I knew, some of the cabin crew were rushing down the aisle yelling, Get off! Get off! Get off! Get off! The plane had just been refilled with 57,000 gallons of jet fuel. If one of those bombs hit, they'd all be dead in seconds. Out of pure habit, some passengers started to open the overhead compartments to get their luggage. But a flight attendant screamed over the noise, quote,

Move, for fuck's sake, leave your gear. In three minutes, the entire plane had disembarked. Explosions continued to bloom in the distance, while fighter jets strafed the airport, attacking the control tower and turning the tarmac into craters of bubbling asphalt. As they streamed into the deserted terminal, looking for guidance, answers, any kind of help, the passengers eventually encountered a group of stern-looking men in uniforms. Soldiers with guns.

And for a second, there was a brief flash of hope that these were Kuwaiti security forces, here to rescue them. But then, they saw the patches on their arms and the look in their eyes. These soldiers were from the Iraqi army. When British Airways Flight 149 had taken off from London six hours earlier, Kuwait had been at peace. But when it landed, its passengers found themselves in the middle of an active war zone. The first hostages of the Gulf War had been taken.

Meanwhile, all across Kuwait, the Iraqi army closed around its objectives like fingers around a windpipe. 100,000 soldiers and 2,000 tanks, supported by fighter jets and heavy artillery, poured across the border in a lightning offensive. They captured key objectives like radio stations and communications arrays, power plants, banks, and seaports. Kuwaiti citizens woke up to a sky filled with swirling sand, kicked up by the thousands of Iraqi vehicles crossing the desert.

And as for the Kuwaiti army, a token force of 16,000 troops, the few that actually fought back died quickly, and the rest threw up their hands in surrender. Kuwait's defense collapsed before it even began. But the Iraqi army's real objective, the real prize, more important than any airport or infrastructure, was lounging in a lavish seaside palace on the

on the north end of Kuwait City. The ruler of Kuwait, the emir, was priority number one. This, after all, was the man who'd ignored Saddam's pleas, shrugged off his threats, and violated oil production quotas while Iraq's economy drowned in debt. If Kuwait had, quote, stabbed Iraq in the back, as Saddam had colorfully put it, the emir was the one holding the knife. And now, by all accounts, he was a sitting duck. As

As a red sun started to peak over the horizon, spilling dawn onto the Kuwaiti beaches, a swarm of helicopters converged on the palace. Iraqi commandos landed on the roof and stormed into the gardens looking to capture or kill the emir. After a chaotic gun battle that lasted all morning, the palace finally fell. But when the smoke cleared and their ears stopped ringing, the Iraqi commandos realized that their prize was nowhere to be found. The emir was gone.

In fact, the entire royal family had vanished into thin air. Just hours before the invasion, the Emir had received a warning call from the Americans, most likely the CIA. Satellite images showed the Iraqi army moving swiftly across the border, they explained.

And unless he wanted to gamble his life on the forgiveness of Saddam Hussein, the Emir needed to get out now. Without issuing orders to the Kuwaiti military or a single word of guidance to the government, the Emir and his family piled into a convoy of Mercedes-Benz limousines and raced south across the desert, into the safe harbor of Saudi Arabia. In his command center back in Baghdad, Saddam received word that the Emir had escaped.

It was a loose end he had hoped to avoid, but as reports flooded back from the battlefield, he started to feel better and better and better. The escape of the emir was just one sour note in a very sweet day. In less than 12 hours, the Iraqi army had completely taken control of Kuwait.

It was, as one historian put it, quote, a complete walkover. All of the oil, all of the investments, all of the wealth now belonged to Saddam Hussein. Never in history, journalist Christopher Dickey wrote, has so much been lost so quickly by so few. The Iraqi dictator could not help but gloat. This was nothing like the catastrophic eight-year conflict with Iran.

The invasion of Kuwait had gone off without a hitch. It was short, it was sweet, and it was over. Saddam now had all the money he would ever need. With access to Kuwait's very liquid assets, he controlled one-fifth of the world's oil supply. As historian Jim Corrigan writes, quote, an annexed Kuwait would yield $20 million a day in additional oil revenues, solving his economic troubles. End quote. Finally, after months of uncertainty and fear and frustration,

things had turned a corner. That evening, Saddam's cigars tasted just a little bit better. There was something, however, that itched in the back of his brain, something a Kuwaiti diplomat had said a few days earlier in response to Saddam's bellicosity. A Kuwaiti negotiator had sneered, quote, Don't threaten us. Kuwait has very powerful friends, and you'll be forced to pay back all the money that you owe us.

Powerful friends, Saddam thought. Please, you mean the Americans, the British, the Saudis? What do you think I am, stupid? Do you really think I'd wipe my ass with the United Nations Charter without getting a green light from the US? All it took was a two-hour conversation with that parrot Glaspy to confirm that the United States would not actually do anything.

They'll whine and stamp their feet for the sake of appearances, but nothing will actually happen. As one American diplomat remembered years later, "Saddam probably figured that the Arab world, and the world at large, would bitch and moan for a couple of days and then people would get used to it, and the world would essentially learn to live with it." Even if the American government did want to go to war in defense of the Gucci Chic's, Saddam reasoned, their people would never allow it.

Unlike dictators, American presidents have voters to answer to, and those voters would never abide thousands of dead boys in the desert. As Saddam had told April Glaspie to her face during their infamous meeting, quote, "...yours is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle."

And so, in the short term, Saddam Hussein felt very, very confident. Kuwait and all its wealth would be absorbed into Iraq. The House of Saddam would endure for a century and beyond. Once again, Saddam the survivor had prevailed. But across the Atlantic, Hussein's alternate reality was already beginning to unravel. I listened to Marlon's briefing and I know most of your questions have been handled and I don't intend to have a

major question and answer period here, but I wanted you to know that first off, we view this situation with gravity. We view it as a matter of grave concern to this country and internationally as well. What Iraq has done violates every norm of international law. And I've been meeting this morning with my top security experts

on the defense side, the economic side. And I'll have another such meeting tomorrow at Camp David. I've been talking to some of the world leaders, and one of the reasons for the delay is I just hung up from talking again to Margaret Thatcher, informing me of steps that the United Kingdom has taken.

As President George H.W. Bush spoke to reporters on the White House lawn, his administration was wrestling with how to respond to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. They didn't know what they were going to do, but they knew they had to do something. The last time George Herbert Walker Bush made an appearance in our story, he was placing his hand on a Bible and being sworn in as President of the United States in January of 1989.

18 months before the crisis in Kuwait. And the road to that oath had been long, difficult, and ugly. There are some leaders who just ooze charisma. People who can walk into a room and project a kind of Churchillian confidence, who instantly command respect, fear, and admiration. George H.W. Bush was not that kind of leader.

A self-described "quiet man" who could often be, in his own words, quote, "awkward" and "not eloquent," George H.W. Bush was not the most obvious candidate for Commander-in-Chief. But what he lacked in personality, he more than made up for in pedigree. Of all the 46 men who have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution as President, few could boast a resume as lengthy or impressive as George H.W. Bush. Born into a well-connected clan of East Coast bluebloods,

Bush seemed destined for a life of prosperity and power. His waspy childhood was a luxurious argyle weave of summers in Maine, posh prep schools, and Connecticut cocktail parties. But

But as privileged as he was, young George had a genuine sense of civic responsibility. And when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the 18-year-old rich kid marched down to the recruiting office and joined up with the Navy. Four years later, Bush came home from the war with several service medals,

and a head full of nightmares. Like all American men of his generation, World War II left a deep imprint on George Bush's psyche. This was a war that was both filmed and understood in black and white, a conflict defined by moral imperatives and clear-cut stakes. In 1939, a rogue dictator in Europe had ignited a conflict that ultimately claimed the lives of 70 million people, and it had all started with the annexation of a tiny patch of territory.

Bush, and many others like him, internalized that lesson, and he believed that it was America's responsibility to make sure that that never, ever happened again. But even with 3% of the global population dead after World War II, the world continued to turn.

And after the war, George put his medals in a box and continued polishing his rapidly expanding resume. While a 10-year-old Saddam Hussein was getting the shit kicked out of him by bullies in backwater Iraq, George Bush was being sworn in to the ultra-exclusive Skull and Bones Society at Yale University. And even though their lives were separated by 7,000 miles and a gulf of generational wealth, both Saddam Hussein and George Bush's fortunes were

were intertwined with the oil industry. After he graduated from Yale, Bush traded his boat shoes for cowboy boots and moved down to Texas to become an oil man. Armed with his father's connections and several generous lines of credit, Bush quickly found success. His oil ventures prospered, his Rolodex expanded, and he was a rich man in his own right within a few years. After that, Bush did what a lot of bored rich guys do. He turned his attention to politics.

George's blood may have been blue, but his ideology was deep red.

After joining the Republican Party, he embarked on a political career that could only be described as hit or miss. Bush seemed to lose more elections than he won, but no matter how many times the voting public said "no thanks," Bush remained buoyant within the Republican Party. Throughout the 1970s, he served as ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the RNC, chief of the liaison office to China, and director of the CIA. In effect, Bush was the ultimate insider.

a man for whom political power was as much of a birthright as an aspiration. And in 1979, in yet another coincidental parallel, Saddam Hussein and George H.W. Bush both decided that they wanted to not just serve,

but lead their respective nations. Saddam, as we know, accomplished this through a bloody theatrical purge. George H.W. Bush, meanwhile, opened up his little black book and decided to call in some favors. He was going to run for president. The year was 1980, and at the age of 56, George Bush made a play for the Republican nomination. But,

But, he was soundly defeated by the charming grin and wavy hair of actor-turned-politico Ronald Reagan. And for a brief moment, Bush's White House dreams appeared to be dashed. But ol' Ronnie knew a loyal lieutenant when he saw one, and rather than discard Bush like a worn-out cowboy hat, Reagan tapped him to be his vice president.

And within a year, George was walking through the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, although not in the way that he'd envisioned or expected. Over the next eight years, George Bush served the Reagan administration well. Maybe a bit too well, in fact.

Bush was so loyal, so in lockstep with his boss, that he developed a reputation as a bit of an empty suit, a doormat, a yes-man, who lacked any convictions or vision of his own. In one famous political comic strip, Bush was portrayed as literally invisible, not even manly enough to take physical form. And that popular perception was most brutally articulated here.

and a Newsweek cover story that dropped the very same day Bush announced he was going to run for president to succeed Ronald Reagan in the 1988 election. In big, bold, white type, Newsweek printed one sentence, four words, and 22 letters that cut George Bush to the bone. Fighting the wimp factor.

Wimp. It was a four-letter word that haunted Bush well into the election season and beyond. An infuriating oversimplification, he called it a, quote, ugly, nasty political shot. And in the face of such withering criticism, Bush used the only shield that he had, his resume. Quote,

"A wimp? My combat comrades didn't think so. My business friends didn't think so. The people at the CIA didn't think so. So why should I be concerned? The American people won't think so." And in the end, he was right. The American voting public ultimately made peace with the wimp factor and sent George to the White House in January of 1989. For better or worse, Bush finally had what he'd always wanted.

And 18 months later, in August of 1990, when an advisor informed the president that the Iraqi army had invaded Kuwait, no one knew how the so-called wimp was going to respond. Would he sit back and do nothing? Would he be the doormat the papers had always accused him of being? As it turned out, as biographer Jeffrey A. Engel writes, quote,

The ensuing six months defined Bush's legacy. Twelve hours after Bush was first told about Kuwait, he convened his National Security Council in the West Wing of the White House. Twenty-nine people from 11 different executive departments sat around a table, talking, trying to decide how to respond to Saddam's invasion. And to be honest, the initial reaction was mostly a collective shrug.

No modern-day White House, Jeffrey Engel observed, is ever truly taken aback by bad news emanating from the Middle East. Does anybody really care about Kuwait? mused Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney shared a similar view, quote, The rest of the world has little interest in poor Kuwait.

Maybe, an Energy Department rep argued, this was a quote "interesting opportunity" to drive oil prices down. Did it really matter whether oil drums had an Iraqi flag or a Kuwaiti flag printed on the side? After all, the United States had no defense agreements with Kuwait, no treaties, no obligation to come to its aid. Even the President seemed somewhat ambivalent, as Bush wrote in his diary later that night, quote "It's halfway around the world.

U.S. options are limited, and all in all, it is a highly complicated situation. The administration's initial response, writes Jeffrey Engel, was disjointed, unclear, and largely devoid of any high-minded principle of salvation or defense of the Kuwaiti regime. The conversation, one White House official remembered, quote, "...suggested resignation to the invasion, and even adoption of a fait accompli."

There was, however, one fact that made everyone in that room very, very nervous. The Iraqi army was way too close for comfort to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Satellite images supposedly showed that Saddam's troops were eight-tenths of a mile away from the Saudi border, like a knife pricking at an oil-rich jugular. Now, the Iraqis weren't showing any signs of attacking or gearing up for assault against the Saudis, but how long would that last?

With his successful conquest of Kuwait, Saddam owned 20% of the world's oil. What if he decided to steamroll into Saudi Arabia and make it 45%? And that open question hung like a cloud in the cabinet room. Almost half the world's oil in the hands of a single man. And not just any man, Saddam friggin' Hussein. The mind reeled at the possibilities. He

He could pump the price up, he could pump it down, he could strangle the economies of smaller nations, you name it. It was, historian John Meacham writes, quote, an untenable prospect for a global economy so dependent on petroleum. In a vacuum, the fall of Kuwait was not a huge problem for the United States, but if their longtime partner Saudi Arabia was even remotely threatened, military action was absolutely on the table.

As Colin Powell observed, quote, we can't make a case for losing lives in Kuwait, but Saudi Arabia is different. Over the course of the next 24 hours, George Bush's conflicted reaction to the Kuwait crisis hardened very quickly, largely thanks to some less than gentle nudging from his national security team. They urged him to reframe his thinking on this thing, to look past the old Cold War conventions. This was not just an economic challenge, they said, but

but an ideological one. The Cold War is over, and we are at a unique moment in history. How we respond to this is going to reset the rules of the game. Mr. President, do we want to live in a world where borders mean nothing? Where big countries can gobble up little countries with impunity? If the United States turns a blind eye to such a flagrant violation of national sovereignty, what kind of ripples will that create? How many other Saddam Husseins will we embolden?

"We would be setting a terrible precedent," urged one advisor, "one that would only accelerate violent centrifugal tendencies in this emerging post-Cold War era, and that also raises the issue of reliability in a most serious way." A State Department rep echoed the point, "This is the first test of the post-war system. If Saddam succeeds, others may try the same thing. It would be a bad lesson.

"Under these circumstances," another stressed, "it is absolutely essential that the U.S. not only put a stop to this aggression, but roll it back." The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, also emphasized this idea to Bush in a heated exchange that week. "If Iraq wins, no small state is safe. They won't stop there. They see a chance to take a major share of oil. It has got to be stopped and we must do everything possible."

And then with a skillful flick of her verbal scalpel, designed to cut the president on his most sensitive issue, Thatcher told Bush that this was not the time to, quote, go wobbly. A.K.A. don't be a wimp, George.

And so Bush is mulling all of this over, pouring thoughts and confessions into his diary late into the night. The enormity of Iraq is upon me now, he reflected. The status quo is intolerable. And what we're doing is going to chart the future of the world for the next hundred years. It is that big. End quote. This was no time for America, much less its president, to be seen as soft or weak or a wimp.

And so, on August 5th, just after 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Bush met with reporters again on the White House lawn and delivered an impromptu line that eventually became the most iconic words of his presidency. Quote, This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.

But while Bush was crafting cable news soundbites, an American delegation to Saudi Arabia was already in the air. After a grueling 16-hour flight, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney stepped off a plane in Riyadh.

the capital of Saudi Arabia. Accompanied by an entourage of CIA and military reps, Cheney's delegation had one goal and one goal alone. Convince the famously prickly Saudis to allow American troops into the kingdom as a shield against the Iraqi army. And if history was any guide, this was not going to be an easy sell. Fourteen centuries earlier, the Prophet Muhammad had famously told his followers, let there be no two religions in Arabia.

And those words, old as they were, still had power for the theocratic regime in Riyadh. As historian Alistair Finlan writes, "...the key factor would be to persuade the very conservative Islamic kingdom to accept large numbers of Christian soldiers into a country that possessed the holiest site in the Muslim world, Mecca." End quote.

And as they sipped cardamom tea in the marble halls of a Riyadh palace, Cheney and his crew sat face-to-face with the elderly monarch of Saudi Arabia, a guy named King Fahd. That's F-A-H-D, Fahd. The Saudi king was a notoriously indecisive ruler, but Dick Cheney was as cool a customer as they came.

Known as the Sphinx among DC elites, Cheney had, according to historian Rick Atkinson, quote, developed inscrutability to an art. He had the best poker face in Washington. And Cheney used that prodigious poker face to convince King Fahd that Saudi Arabia needed America's help. If we fail to deal with Saddam now, Cheney urged,

He will only grow stronger and more threatening. I'd like to receive your approval to proceed with introducing U.S. forces. The president asked me to assure you that we will stay as long as you want us, and we will leave when you no longer need us. We will stay until justice is done, but not stay a minute longer. We are not seeking bases, but you are a long way away, and we need to make joint preparations now."

King Fahd agreed that Saddam was a big problem, and that his plans might not end with the conquest of Kuwait. Quote, It's not just his aggression against Kuwait. He aspires to something larger. End quote. And like bees around a hive, the king's advisors murmured admonitions into his ear, allowing Christian soldiers into the Arabian Peninsula at the scale that Cheney was talking about had

had never been done in the history of the kingdom. The people would be furious, the clergy would be apoplectic, it might even violate religious law. But King Fahd was convinced by Cheney's presentation. "We have to do this," the Saudi monarch croaked. "The Kuwaitis waited, and they waited too long, and now there no longer is a Kuwait." "There is still a Kuwait," one advisor hissed.

Yes, said the king, and all the Kuwaiti royals are living in our hotel rooms. And so the king turned to Cheney and said, quote, Okay, we'll do it. Two conditions. One, you bring enough to do the job, and two, you will leave when it's over. End quote. As the American delegation finished their tea, packed up their papers, and prepared to leave, Cheney turned to the king and said, quote, This has been a truly historic meeting. End quote.

"'No doubt it is,' replied the king. And with that, the United States had been given the keys to the kingdom, literally. Back in Washington, D.C., the gravity of events began to sink in for George H.W. Bush. "'I feel great pressure, but I also feel a certain calmness when we talk about these matters. I know that I am doing the right thing. The troops are underway. This is the biggest step of my presidency.'"

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week wherever you get your podcasts.

It's late August of 1990. We're in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, just a few weeks after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. In the wake of King Fahd's deal with the Americans, the city is a very busy place. The Muslim calls to prayer are all but drowned out by the constant whine of jet engines overhead. Across the city, the tempo of war is rising.

According to Saeed K. Al-Burish, quote, a U.S. military plane carrying troops or war materials was landing in Saudi Arabia every 10 minutes, end quote. But amidst all this sound and fury, one man quietly walks into the Saudi Defense Ministry carrying a bundle of maps and diagrams. He is very tall, about 6'4", with a long black beard and big brown eyes.

He's a young guy, only about 33 years old, but as he walks into the Defense Ministry, he is treated with the utmost sense of warmth and respect. To his countrymen, this young man is a war hero, a veteran of the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a tried and true Mujahid, or holy warrior. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, this man left his pampered life in Saudi Arabia at the age of 22 to help organize a guerrilla resistance against the Red Army.

He donated his time, his money, and the young years of his life to the cause of the Mujahideen. But the Soviet-Afghan war is over. Time marches on, and for a holy warrior, there are always new battles to fight.

The young Mujahid is here today in Riyadh to meet with the Saudi Defense Minister, Crown Prince Sultan. The Mujahid has a proposal to make, services to offer. And once pleasantries are exchanged and introductions are made, the young man tells the Crown Prince that he wants to fight Saddam Hussein, to lead an all-out jihad against the Iraqi army and drive it out of Kuwait. Quote, I want to fight against Saddam, an infidel. I want to establish a guerrilla war against Iraq. The Crown Prince,

The Crown Prince gently explains that there is no need. We have secured the partnership of the Americans, they've pledged a quarter million troops to protect the kingdom. Even now thousands are arriving every day. That is exactly the problem, the young radical responds. Allowing American soldiers, Christian soldiers, into the kingdom is a direct violation of our faith. Saudis should be protecting Saudi Arabia, not these imperialist oil-guzzling pigs. And he

And he goes on, quote, End quote. The crown prince, becoming exasperated, replies that fighting in Kuwait is not the same as fighting in Afghanistan. Quote, End quote.

End quote. We will fight them with faith, the Mujahid answers.

Ultimately, the crown prince declined the offer, and it wounded the young Mujahid deeply. As he stormed out of the defense ministry in a huff, rejected and angry, the young man decided that he would make the United States pay for their disgusting incursion into the Arab world. Not today, not tomorrow, but someday soon. And that young man's name was Osama bin Laden.

Maybe you've heard of him. As historian Peter Bergen writes, "...the arrival of a large U.S. army in the kingdom was a transformational event that hardened bin Laden's anti-Americanism into a passionate hatred for the United States." Even the crown prince noticed a shift in the young bin Laden. "...the arrival of a large U.S. army in the kingdom was a transformational event that hardened bin Laden's anti-Americanism into a passionate hatred for the United States."

End quote.

As bin Laden receded into the shadows to fight another day, American troops continued to flow into the Saudi kingdom, tens of thousands of men and women who suddenly found themselves very far from home. One of these soldiers was a 20-year-old Marine named Anthony Swafford. In his famous memoir of the Gulf War, Jarhead, Swafford describes the scene that greeted him after stepping off a plane in Riyadh. Quote,

The tarmac is full of American civilian jumbo jets. American, Delta, United. We flew United. The scene on the airfield is like that at any busy international airport, only we passengers are wearing fatigues and carrying loaded rifles. Our gas masks strapped to our hips. Just beyond the tarmac, artillery batteries point their guns east and north.

End quote. To many U.S. soldiers who'd grown up in the cities and suburbs and trailer parks of North America, the stark, alien landscape of Saudi Arabia felt unnerving and unwelcoming. As a pilot named Buck Windham observed, quote, End quote.

End quote. But despite the ugly scenery, there was an undeniable weight to the desert, an intangible sense of import and history. Wyndham continued, quote, End quote.

as if a thousand years of devout spiritual determination had seeped into every rock and grain of sand, mixed with waves of hatred for the infidels flying overhead. It momentarily gave me a very bad feeling, and I could tell it was going to be a bit of a mental challenge to overcome my own insecurities about this place. Maybe I just need to immerse myself in it, like hot bathwater, and I'll get used to it.

End quote. For all their reservations, Anthony Swafford and Buck Windham were just two tiny cogs in a massive, mind-boggling ballet of military logistics that would eventually become known as Operation Desert Shield. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers would eventually be sent into the Persian Gulf. It was the largest American military deployment since Vietnam.

But, unlike Vietnam, the immediate objectives of Desert Shield were abundantly clear to the men and women serving in it. Back in Washington, President Bush was speaking in soaring, high-minded rhetoric, but most American soldiers had no illusions about why they had been deployed to a lifeless desert halfway across the world. As Anthony Swofford cynically explained, quote,

Our mission is to protect, to shield Saudi Arabia and her flowing oil fields. We'll be shielding enough oil to drive hundreds of millions of cars for hundreds of millions of miles, all at a relatively minor cost to the American consumer. We joke about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps, or the Petrol Battalion. And while we laugh at our jokes and we all think we're damn funny jarheads, we know we might soon die. And this is not funny.

We are being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House and oblique financial entanglements with the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, and the Commander-in-Chief, George Bush, and the Commander's progeny. We know this because Coon, one of our representatives from Texas, just meaning a fellow soldier, says, "...all those old white fuckers from Texas have their fat hands in Arab oil. The motherfuckers drink it like it's beer."

And as thousands of well-armed, well-trained American soldiers marched off the tarmacs in Riyadh every hour on the hour, one could not help but marvel at the radical transformation the US military had undergone over the last 15 years. This was not the same army that had fled Saigon in disgrace and disarray. The US military in 1990 was almost unrecognizable from the slapdash clusterfuck that had limped out of the Vietnamese jungle.

As military historians James Dunagan and Raymond Macedonia write, "...the military that went into the Gulf was prepared not by accident but by tremendous effort in the preceding 20 years. The American taxpayers got their money's worth, and a lot of American soldiers owe their lives to these two decades of effort."

Back when the Vietnam War came to a close, the U.S. military was in very, very bad shape. It was, according to its critics, a hollow army, an empty shell of squandered potential and systemic incompetence. As Dunagan and Macedonia describe, quote, By the mid-1970s, the U.S. Army was not a pleasant place to be. Drug use, racial animosities, low-quality troops, and inexperienced NCOs resulted in a crime wave in Army bases.

Officers, and anyone else handy, were mugged by their own troops. Some were even murdered. Officers in many units were reluctant to enter barracks alone or without a pistol on their hip. Vietnam had created a loss of confidence in the military as a winning force as well as a loss of confidence in the professionalism of the military. End quote.

But as they say, sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can turn a corner. And starting in the late 1970s, that is exactly what the U.S. military did. Turbocharged by a huge influx of spending, courtesy of the Carter and Reagan administrations, about $3 trillion in all, the U.S. armed forces reinvented themselves along almost every significant vector.

Entire books have been written about the how, what, and why of this process, but it essentially boiled down to a very simple philosophy. People in the military should want to be in the military.

and they should be well-trained, well-paid, and well-armed. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. had famously relied on the draft, or conscription, to fill the ranks of its army. That meant there were tons of kids who were dragged literally into boot camp to serve in an organization that they did not believe in for a cause that they did not understand. And these, quote, ill-trained citizen soldiers, as one historian put it, died by the thousands in Vietnam. But during the 1980s, everything changed.

the U.S. military transitioned to an all-volunteer fighting force. What that meant was that if you were in uniform, you had specifically chosen to be in uniform. And these volunteers were given decent paychecks, world-class weaponry, and trained to a razor's edge. As the saying went, quote, "...the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war."

In less than 20 years, the U.S. military transformed itself from a political punchline into the deadliest fighting force in human history. As Dunagan and Macedonia describe, quote, the contrast between the American Army of August 1973 and the American Army of August 1990 was mind-boggling. But as guys like Anthony Swafford and Buck Windham touched down in Riyadh, the

the true battlefield efficacy of these reforms was mostly theoretical. No one knew what Saddam Hussein was going to do, but whatever happened in the Persian Gulf was going to be a major test of the American military's reforms. For an entire generation of commanders haunted and traumatized by the failures of Vietnam, it was a golden opportunity for redemption, a chance to restore the honor and reputation of their organization.

But it also held the potential for another humiliating performance. If push came to shove, this was going to be a, quote, final exam for the reformed army, as one writer put it. The jungle ghosts of the past would be exercised in the vast open deserts of the Middle East, wrote historian Alistair Finland. But for now, the U.S. military's job in Saudi Arabia was to simply hurry up and wait. To arm up, sit tight, and watch the Saudi border like a hawk.

A confrontation with Iraq was coming, but what form it would take and when, that was still unclear. Across the Saudi border, past the tanks and trenches and barbed wire, beyond the desert and the highways stretching all the way back to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein was beginning to feel an old, unpleasant sensation. That twinge in his stomach that had kept him alive for 30 years. The feeling of fear.

Things were not going according to plan. No sooner had he taken Kuwait than it had turned to ash in his palms. The Americans, those conspiring bastards, had been very, very busy. Before the victory champagne even went flat, Saddam began receiving one piece of bad news after another. The day of the invasion, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning Iraq and calling for its withdrawal from Kuwait.

That, Saddam had kind of expected. Empty theater, after all, was a United Nations specialty. But what happened next was much more concerning. On August 6th, while Dick Cheney was meeting with King Fahd in Riyadh, the UN passed a resolution to impose economic sanctions on Iraq. A trade embargo was established, enforced by US battleships, to squeeze Iraq's already suffocating economy. From now on, no one was going to be buying oil with an Iraqi flag on it.

Worse still, the United States and other countries across the world had frozen Kuwaiti assets, that vast multi-billion dollar network of accounts and investments that Saddam had hoped to use to refill his coffers. In essence, Hussein had stolen the treasure chest, but now he had no way to open it. He was locked out, like a bank robber covered in blue dye and surrounded by angry cops.

Saddam had hoped, even expected, that no one would really care about his invasion of Kuwait. As Jeffrey Engel writes, quote, the only thing the world loved about Kuwait was its oil. Instead, the invasion had unified the entire world against him in a display of international solidarity not seen since World War II. As it turned out, the most fearsome weapon in the American arsenal wasn't a tank or a ship or a bomb or a plane. It was a checkbook.

and a telephone. Six thousand miles away in Washington, D.C., George Bush had been calling every world leader he could get a hold of. As he told his diary, quote, "'I have been on the phone incessantly, and I have written down a long collection of names.'"

Bush knew that if he was going to send a quarter million American troops into the Middle East, he would need the support and cooperation of as many other nations as possible. This could not be another Lone Ranger-style misadventure like Vietnam. They needed an alliance, a coalition, an unprecedented symbol of international unity in the post-Cold War reality. And from his gilded palace in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein watched in horror as almost the entire world joined the alliance against him.

It was, according to one historian, quote, the most elaborate political and military coalition since the Napoleonic Wars. As historian John Meacham writes, quote, The president made clear that American warriors were touching down in a faraway kingdom with the support and sanction of a symphony of nations. In the end, 35 countries would join the Bush-led coalition by contributing militarily. Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia,

Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

and of course the United States. The Soviet Union and China were also diplomatically supportive.

And I know that was a long, tedious list, but you gotta understand how incredible this was at the time. Even the Soviet Union sided with the U.S. on the issue of Kuwait. As Bush's Secretary of State James Baker later recalled, "...I think the Cold War ended when the foreign minister of the Soviet Union stood side-by-side with the American Secretary of State on August 3, 1990, at an airport in Moscow, and condemned the action of a Soviet client state, Iraq."

But of course, not all of these nations were joining the coalition out of the kindness of their hearts or for the preservation of high-minded ideals. To add as many layers of legitimacy to his crusade as possible, George Bush was prepared to grease palms, scratch backs, and write a few fat checks if necessary. Because as it turns out, money not only talks, it is multilingual. Yes,

Esaid K. Aburish writes, "...altogether, the creation of the alliance was underwritten by the largest bribe in recorded history, probably in all history."

Throughout August and September, America proceeded to make it rain all over the world. The Soviet Union received a generous financial package in $6 billion. Egypt was forgiven $10 billion in debt. Syria was paid $5 billion. Turkey got $2.5 billion and a boatload of weapons. The US even turned a blind eye to China's abysmal human rights record to guarantee their cooperation. Any nation that did not stand with the alliance, on the other hand, was savagely punished.

When Yemen refused to vote with the rest of the United Nations against Iraq, Secretary of State James Baker told their representative that it was "the most expensive vote they would ever cast." And as the bribes changed hands and the coalition hardened into a monolith, things were looking very, very bad for Saddam Hussein. As Efrem Kars and Inari Rautsi describe, "Saddam was trapped." For him, the invasion of Kuwait was not a matter of personal whim or greed, it was

It was a measure stemming from dire necessity, a desperate bid to gain the vital financial resources on which his political future hinged. It was essential for his survival and thus to him a justifiable act. Moreover, he had taken all the necessary precautions to reduce the attendant risks of this step to the barest minimum. He had warned the Kuwaitis time and again not to continue their "economic conspiracy" against Iraq.

He had even sought, and in his view received, a quote, green light from the United States for an action against Kuwait.

Now, all of a sudden, his scheme turned sour. Instead of the simple, straightforward operation he believed he had mounted, he found himself facing a nightmare scenario. It was no longer a conflict between Iraq and Kuwait, but rather a feud between Iraq and almost the entire international community. End quote. Saddam had invaded Kuwait to alleviate his economic problems and had

and instead he made them infinitely worse, turning the entire world against him in the process. He thought that he had played Ambassador April Glaspy like a fiddle back in July, twisting her toothless regurgitations into a veritable permission slip to invade. Well, he was wrong. And ironically, it was Glaspy who got the last word on her controversial sit-down with Saddam. Quote, "...we foolishly did not realize that Saddam was stupid."

As he stood behind his desk in a haze of cigar smoke, racking his brain about what to do, it occurred to Saddam that not all was lost. If the Americans wanted to play hardball, if they wanted to turn the entire world against him, all for the sake of a few Gucci sheiks, well, he knew how to play hardball too. There were plenty of dead bodies in plenty of basements who could attest to that.

For all his disadvantages, Saddam had one last ace up his sleeve. Something that would melt their shiny new coalition like butter in the sun. The Americans had Operation Desert Shield. But Saddam had something even better. Human shields. He had hostages.

It's August 24th, 1990. We're in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. Across the Middle East, the mood is tense. With tens of thousands of American troops assembling on the Saudi border, the entire region rests on a hair trigger. But in this small, clean room in Baghdad, things seem cheerful, relaxed, even festive. There are colorful balloons in the air, a cake on the table, and a group of small children playing and giggling.

In the midst of one of the greatest diplomatic crises of the 20th century, we are at a little kid's birthday party. The guests of this birthday party are primarily British nationals, professionals and foreign contractors who'd been working inside Kuwait before Saddam's invasion. But now, they are prisoners.

hostages kept by the Iraqi government. Like the unlucky passengers of British Airways Flight 149, which touched down in Kuwait just hours after the invasion, thousands of these foreign nationals found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, trapped in a war zone and hunted by the Iraqi army.

Americans, British, French, Germans, Malaysians, Japanese, a veritable united nations of people who had no way out of Iraq, no way of getting home. Some of these people were able to evade capture, cowering in abandoned apartments or sheltering with sympathetic Kuwaitis, but the vast majority have been scooped up and taken back to Iraq to serve as human shields, an insurance policy against any hostility from George Bush's rapidly expanding coalition.

And as they cut the cake and light the candles, the parents of the children at this Baghdad birthday party are painfully aware that this little facade of frivolity is paper thin. On Iraqi state media, they are euphemistically referred to as, quote, foreign guests. But with their passports confiscated and their movement restricted, they are captives through and through.

After all, how many birthday parties are attended by armed guards and ringed by television cameras? The parents know perfectly well that this birthday party is just a PR stunt, a shallow pantomime for the cameras. But they do their best to keep their kids calm and relaxed. Everyone is terrified, but if they can give their kids the briefest moment of normalcy, well, that'd be worth it. But a few moments later, that normalcy is shattered by the arrival of one last party guest. He

He is wearing a sharp gray suit. His hair is coiffed and camera ready. His mustache has been combed to perfection. Saddam Hussein has arrived to say hello to the children. And the mood in the room instantly changes. The guards get nervous and jittery. The camera crews begin herding the children towards Saddam.

and the parents glare at their host through fake smiles and clenched fists. Like any dictator worth his salt, Saddam knows the value of a good PR stunt. He may be holding thousands of foreign nationals, entire families against their will, but he wants to show the world that they are being well treated, that he is not the monster George Bush and Margaret Thatcher and all the rest say that he is.

I mean, would a monster throw a birthday party for one of his child captives? Unfortunately for him, Saddam's propaganda instincts had all the sophistication of a sledgehammer. And as he mugged for the cameras with a gaggle of terrified kids, he failed to see the impression that he was creating. The most memorable and infamous moment of this goodwill visit happened when Saddam called a five-year-old boy named Stuart Lockwood over to his side.

You can actually find footage of this, and the little boy, Stuart, just looks absolutely terrified. He's stiff as a board, not smiling, physically recoiling, as Saddam literally pets his head.

Stewart remembered years later as an adult, quote,

And any five-year-old backs off when a stranger tries to sit them on their lap. I don't think it was just because it was Saddam Hussein.

Suffice to say, Saddam's propaganda stunt was not the slam dunk he thought it would be with international audiences. The entire thing just came off as extremely creepy and weird, and it only served to highlight the fact that Saddam was holding kids as hostages to deter any military action from Bush's coalition. The whole Stuart Lockwood affair, writes Saeed K. Al-Burish, was, quote, a prime example of his stupid policies and

and misjudgment of Western feelings. But for anyone paying attention, this was classic Saddam. This was just how the Iraqi dictator had always done business. Impulsive, unsentimental, improvisational. As Karsh and Routzi explain, quote,

Saddam's decision to use the foreign hostages as a bargaining chip afforded yet another vivid illustration of his stark worldview. One's own survival justified all and any means. There was no room for legalistic or moral niceties. Mindful of Western sensitivity to human life, he was determined to exploit this Achilles' heel to the full. End quote.

Saddam's calculus was clear: by keeping thousands of foreign hostages in Iraq, he was gambling that the coalition's resolve to remove his army from Kuwait would soften and break over time. That the world's attention would shift to a long, drawn-out hostage crisis, not the annexation of a sovereign state and the theft of a vast percentage of the world's oil supplies. And as per usual, Saddam's math was a bit off.

Back in Washington, President George H.W. Bush captured the feelings of many in a diary entry, quote, "'Blatant hostage-holding, another blatant disregard of international law by a cruel and ruthless dictator. I can't see how we can get out of it without punishing Iraq. I mean, what they are doing is unprincipled.'" The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, expressed her opinion a bit more colorfully, quote, "'True Arab heroes do not hide behind the skirts of women and behind little children.'"

But not all of the hostages were being treated to birthday cakes and photo ops with Saddam Hussein. Across Iraq and Kuwait, hundreds of people were going through the most traumatizing ordeal of their lives. In the days following the invasion, Saddam's army swept through Kuwait, gathering up as many Western nationals as they could find, with a particular focus on American and British citizens. The soldiers were ruthless in their search, as an American dentist named Robert Morris remembered, quote,

It was a cash reward for handing in Westerners. We were hearing that Kuwaitis who hid Westerners were strung up and castrated in front of their own families. Some Arabs offered refuge to foreigners and then suddenly turned them in to the police." Once captured, the hostages were stripped of their passports, loaded onto buses at gunpoint, and deposited in various camps and settlements across Iraq. Along the way, they saw what had been done to Kuwait in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

According to a hostage named Fred Hart, quote, Almost every official Kuwait government building along the route had been shelled, torched, or destroyed. Wrecked and smoldering vehicles littered the highway, some with the charred remains present. The once well-manicured and green medians were now brown, dried up, and trashed. Another hostage, an engineer named Jan Batt, recalled, quote, Buildings had been bombed to rubble. Stores had been looted.

and dead bodies and garbage were strewn all over the city, covered by swarms of flies. We noted no human activity other than the omnipresence of the soldiers and the tanks rolling by. As guests of the Iraqi army, the hostages were placed in locations that would be high priority targets in a potential allied attack. Places like munitions factories, oil refineries, and power stations.

And rather than being taken care of, they were mostly left to fend for themselves. But as they scavenged for food, rationed water, and carefully allocated resources, they were never far from an armed guard or the barrel of a gun. Naturally, this took a heavy emotional toll on the hostages who had no idea when or if they would ever get to go home. As a woman named Daphne Halkyard remembered, "...chronic fear became a way of life for us."

Every day there was something on which we could focus. We were afraid of being bombed by the Allies. We were afraid of illness. We were afraid of being lynched. We were afraid of the breakdown of some of our fellow hostages. We were afraid of letting something slip that could have jeopardized members of our little group. We were watching our backs the whole time. But there was nothing we could do, nothing we could do. Our lives were on the line, and we had no illusions whatsoever about that.

Another hostage named Jan Batt, who had been a passenger on British Airways Flight 149, remembered, quote, I rarely slept for more than a couple hours at a time, owing to the difficult conditions and impending sense of doom that were forever occupying my mind. I existed in a state of constant fear and extreme anxiety as the idea that U.S. hostages might be killed on international television in a theatrical warning to the United States

continuously plagued me. I also understood, from the beginning of my detention as a human shield, that owing to the nature of the locations at which I was detained, I would be among the first to die in the event of an Allied aerial bombardment.

I tried hard to remain in a positive frame of mind, but the longer I was detained and the more physical hardships I endured, the more hope I lost and the more depressed I grew. The brutal and unexpected manner in which I had been seized from my British Airways flight contributed greatly to my extreme disorientation in the initial phases of captivity. One moment I had had a good life. I was financially secure and on my way to India for a family vacation, and the next I was in captivity.

attempting to reconcile myself to the fact that I might never see my family again." End quote. Eventually, a sense of deep despair and fatalism settled in for many of the hostages. A man named Paul Eliopoulos recalled, quote, "...we were resigned to our fate. I mean, we were convinced we were going to be killed. We just hoped it would be done in a dignified way. I mean, my greatest fear was that they were going to hurt us before they killed us. We just wished we would go out fast." End quote.

Most hostages managed to escape any serious physical mistreatment, but for some, like a British Airways steward named Charles Christensen, their worst fears became reality. As Charles remembered, quote,

I was raped by an Iraqi officer. He was an officer older than me, but I'm not quite sure by how many years. He came to visit me several times. I couldn't stand it. I wanted to get shot. Sometimes I felt I just wanted to go outside and run and get it over with.

End quote. And Charles was not the only hostage left with psychological wounds. During his captivity, a 10-year-old boy named Colin Blears saw something deeply upsetting. Something that lodged a splinter into his young mind. As he was being driven around Kuwait City, Colin caught sight of several bodies dangling from a crane. Dead Kuwaitis strung up by Iraqi soldiers and swaying in the hot breeze.

And something about the way that the men were hanging drove Colin, again, just a 10-year-old kid, to try and take his own life. As journalist Stephen Davis describes, quote, One day, Colin was in their room when he suddenly cried out and ran out to the balcony and began to climb over the rails. He was grabbed before he could jump to what would have been certain death, but he remained depressed and withdrawn for a long time afterward.

End quote. But for other hostages, the worst part of the captivity was the uncertainty and tedium of it all. The complete lack of updates or context or information. According to a man named Paul Deep, quote, Most of it was crashingly boring because there's nothing to do. You're in limbo. You're kind of cut off from life. And although we had some contact, a little bit with the outside world through radio or whatever, we actually knew nothing about anything that was going on around us. End quote.

By the end of August 1990, Saddam Hussein realized that keeping these hostages was only intensifying the world's anger against him, only confirming what was being said in nightly newsrooms from Houston to Helsinki. So, as a gesture of goodwill, he decided to release the women and children from Iraqi custody. Stuart Lockwood and Colin Blears and Daphne Halkyard and all the rest were going home. But the male hostages, anyone over the age of 16...

They would have to stay. And that meant wives leaving behind husbands, children leaving behind fathers,

and mothers leaving behind sons. Families being split apart, possibly for good. A woman named Deborah Saloom remembered saying goodbye to her husband George, quote, "'I don't think it is possible to prepare yourself for that kind of separation. We hugged a lot, and when we walked through the gates and I saw my husband looking through the window blowing kisses at me, I thought, this is it. I'll never see him again.'"

And Deborah struggled to express herself in a letter that she left behind for George. Dear George,

I don't know what to say. My heart is full. I love you with all my heart. I will do my best to care for Preston and Nathan. Those are their sons. And I'll never rest until we're all together again. I know you'll be fine. I'll work to get you out any way I can. My love and my heart are here with you. See you home, my beautiful rambling wreck. That was her pet name for him. Love, Deb."

When it came to his dealings with the West, Saddam Hussein never met a diplomatic rake he could not step on. And in yet another tragicomic example of his strategic incompetence, this half-measure with the hostages only

only succeeded in deepening the world's resentment against him. Back in Washington, Saddam's cold-hearted bungling of the hostage situation served as red meat for the war hawks, who wanted to set aside the flaccid UN sanctions and use more tangible weapons to pry Iraq's claws out of Kuwait. Not embargoes, not resolutions, real weapons. Bullets, bombs, missiles, and jets. The dogs of war were baying for blood,

and the man holding the leash was starting to loosen his grip. As a long-time advocate for American military power, President George H.W. Bush found himself right at home amongst the hawks, and before long he was itching for a confrontation with the dictator he now regularly compared to Adolf Hitler. As the weeks and months dragged on, as the drip feed of horror stories leaked out of Kuwait, the crisis in the Persian Gulf began to take on a uniquely moral dimension for Bush.

His view of Saddam, biographer John Meacham writes, was now set in black and white. In the president's mind, this was a historic confrontation, a crusade against what he called, quote, the epitome of evil. As Bush wrote in his diary, quote,

I do think that World War II shaped my thinking on the Gulf. I have Saddam Hussein now as clearly bad and evil as Hitler and as the Japanese war machine that attacked Pearl Harbor. And I say, check him now. Check him now. My mind goes back to history, Bush reflected. How many lives would have been saved if appeasement had given way to force earlier on in the late 30s or earliest 40s?

How many Jews might have been spared the gas chambers? Or how many Polish patriots might be alive today? I look at today's crisis as good versus evil. Yes, it is that clear.

This was Bush's big moment, his page in the history books, his chance to prove to the world that he was still strong, that the United States was still strong. At this crucial juncture, America could not afford a wimp in the Oval Office. "I am determined," Bush confided to his diary, "that I could not be a Jimmy Carter, an impotent, flicking U.S. impotence in the eyes of the world.

As historian John Meacham described Bush's mindset, quote,

could become bigger wars. But wars are like products. Before they are fought, they have to be packaged, marketed, justified, and sold. Even a just war is never just war. War means fighting, and fighting means killing, and killing means bodies. And just 15 years after the bungle in the jungle, was the American public really ready to go through all of that again?

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell said at the time, quote, the American people do not want their young dying for a buck-fifty-gallon oil. And for that reason, the Bush administration was going to have to be very precise with their language. They were going to have to convince the American people that a war with Saddam Hussein would be a good war, a

A righteous war. As the 20-year-old Marine Anthony Swofford observed from his tent in the Saudi desert a few months later, quote, I am a soldier in a, quote, conflict. A, quote, conflict is much easier for the American public to swallow than a war. War still has that messy Vietnam feeling. The Vietnam War was not an official war either, but a perpetually escalating conflict with many poor, dead, sad fuckers.

But ironically, the best salesman for a hypothetical war against Iraq was none other than Saddam Hussein himself, who'd managed to make all the wrong moves and send all the wrong signals. He had taken hostages, breached international norms, and most egregiously of all, his

his actions had resulted in higher oil prices for the average American consumer. The unforgivable sin. And it wasn't long before public opinion in the U.S. began to drift towards a military confrontation with Iraq. The development that came as a pleasant surprise to the president. He told his diary, quote, The hardhats charge out from their trailers or from the building projects, the waiters, the people in the stores, and you hear, Go for it, George. Give them hell, George. Go for it, George.

From parking attendants, the airplane service people. It is strong support. But you know how I feel about polls, dear diary. I think they come and go. And we can be up and down. And yes, I am pleased with the amount of support that I'm getting, but I know it can change. Fast.

End quote. As support for a war against Saddam continued to grow and Bush's rhetoric continued to intensify, one extremely visceral news story pierced the public consciousness. On October 10th, 1990, about two and a half months after Saddam's invasion, a 15-year-old girl from Kuwait testified in front of a congressional committee. And in her tearful testimony, she described war crimes that she had personally witnessed in her home country.

Identified only by her first name, Nayira, this young girl went on to recount atrocities committed by the Iraqi army. She claimed that Iraqi soldiers, while looting a Kuwaiti hospital, had removed premature babies from their incubators and left them to die on the hospital tile. And here is actual audio of that testimony. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Nayira and I just came out of Kuwait.

The second week after the invasion, I volunteered at the Al-Adhan Hospital with 12 other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The other women were from 20 to 30 years old. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming to the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying. I could not help but think of my nephew.

A newborn premature might have died that day as well. After I left the hospital, some of my friends and I distributed flyers condemning the Iraqi invasion. Until we were warned we might be killed...

For anyone with two ears and a conscience, that testimony is undeniably effective. And unsurprisingly, Nayyirah's story caught fire in the American media ecosystem, blazing to life as a perfect, horrifying example of just how bad Saddam and his soldiers were. And for President Bush, the Nayyirah testimony was a gift from PR heaven.

It was simple, it was human, it was something that every American in every living room across the country could understand. In the coming weeks, Bush went on to cite Nayyirah's testimony more than half a dozen times in speeches across the country. There was just one problem, however. Nayyirah and her testimony were a lie, a complete falsification. As one academic summarized in a 2017 piece for American Quarterly, quote,

Only after the war did Americans learn that Nayyirah's testimony was fabricated. Ten months after the ceasefire, the journalist John MacArthur revealed in a New York Times editorial that Nayyirah was not your average Kuwaiti teenager. She was the daughter of the country's ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir al-Sabah,

who had been sitting four seats down from her, unacknowledged at the caucus hearing. Nayyirah never volunteered at the Al-Adhan Hospital. She had visited only once, and during that visit had not witnessed babies taken from incubators by looting soldiers because such an incident had never occurred. The incubator story was a myth that had been circulating among Kuwaitis in Britain and in the United States since the late summer and treated as fact by the Daily Telegraph of London and the Los Angeles Times. Nayyirah,

Nayira's decision to assume the story as her own was a result of coaching by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for its client Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a U.S.-based organization bankrolled by the Kuwaiti government to advocate for the United States to militarily intervene on behalf of Kuwait. End quote.

Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army were, of course, guilty of very real atrocities and very real breaches of international law. But ironically, it was a fabricated story that ultimately crystallized the issue for the American public and

and tipped the scales toward war. To borrow an old saying, a lie can run around the world before the truth even has its boots on. It would be a full year and a half before anyone knew the truth about the Nayyirah testimony. But in the final months of 1990, it achieved the exact effect its orchestrators had intended. The result of the voting is as follows. Twelve votes in favor.

Two votes against, one abstention. The draft resolution has been adopted as Resolution 678-1990.

On November 29th, 1990, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 678, authorizing the use of, quote, Furthermore, it gave Saddam Hussein a final ultimatum, an official deadline.

Pull your army out of Kuwait by January 15th, 1991, or this coalition will pull them out for you. Real military intervention was now officially on the table, and no one expected Saddam Hussein to run back to Baghdad with his tail tucked between his legs. In all likelihood, the

the coalition was going to war. In Saudi Arabia, the American soldiers serving in Operation Desert Shield were beginning to feel a change in the air. As the Marine Anthony Swofford commented at the time, quote, If I were apocalyptically inclined, I might well think that the end is nigh.

But when you're about to go to war, you need a war plan. Thankfully, the American military brass had already been working on one for months. Operation Desert Shield was about to become Operation Desert Storm. And now a message from the President of the United States. Good evening. Happy holidays to y'all. Once again, it's that festive season. Tonight our Jewish friends observe the fifth night of Hanukkah.

The celebration of a military victory one centuries ago in a part of the world where today 400,000 brave Americans await my order to annihilate Iraq. None of us want war in that whole area out over there. But as Commander-in-Chief, I'm ever cognizant of my authority to launch a full-scale orgy of death there on the desert sand. Probably won't, but then again, I might.

Now, if we do go to war, I can assure you it will not be another Vietnam, because we have learned, well, the simple lesson of Vietnam. Stay out of Vietnam. That's right.

That's comedian Dana Carvey doing his famous George H.W. Bush impression during a December 15, 1990 episode of Saturday Night Live, just one month before the final deadline for Iraq to pull its troops out of Kuwait. Sometimes comedy can be the most transparent and telling window into a country's feelings about a particular issue or problem. And

And in that cold open, you can hear all the conflicting emotions and reservations that Americans had about the impending showdown with Saddam Hussein. The dorky countenance of the commander-in-chief, juxtaposed against the frightening power he could unleash. The general unfamiliarity people had with Kuwait, a vague over-there place that most Americans couldn't find on a map. And then, of course, the lingering ghosts of Vietnam, that pervasive feeling of please, please.

please, let's not do that again. And while the cameras were rolling on Dana Carvey in New York City, 6,500 miles away in Saudi Arabia, the finishing touches were being put on America's war plan to dislodge the Iraqi army from Kuwait. The plan to defend Saudi Arabia from any potential attack had been dubbed Desert Shield, but the offensive plan would need a slightly more theatrical and threatening moniker. Operation Desert Storm was almost a go. It

It would become, John Meacham writes, quote, "...the largest and most complex American military operation in a generation. Half a million men and women, 130,000 tanks and vehicles, 519,000 tons of ammunition and supplies."

2.5 billion gallons of fuel, all of it drawn back like a mailed fist and aimed squarely at the face of the Iraqi army. This was going to be a generation-defining operation, something that could make or break America's reputation on the global stage. And George H.W. Bush may have been the nominal commander-in-chief of this shindig in the desert, but he knew that the actual execution of a hot war is best left to the experts.

President Lyndon B. Johnson had once bragged at the height of the Vietnam War that American pilots, quote, can't even bomb an outhouse without my approval. Well, Bush, for all his faults, knew better than to micromanage a war from the Oval Office.

The military men who'd spent the last 15 to 20 years rebuilding the hollow army of Vietnam into the deadliest organization on the planet were not about to let the suits in Washington tell them how to fight. This was their one chance for redemption, their big shot at restoring faith in the American military. But who, exactly, was going to be calling those shots?

Who was going to be the ringleader of this rodeo? Well, that very important task fell on the broad, beefy shoulders of a four-star army general named Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.,

Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf, as the American media would soon christen him. And honestly, for my money, Stormin' Norman is without a doubt one of the most colorful characters in this story. Picture, if you will, the biggest, meanest high school football coach you have ever seen, and you'll start to have a pretty good mental approximation of General Norman Schwarzkopf. In 1990, he is 56 years old.

At 6'3", 240 pounds, he is like a mountain in any room he steps into. A great slab of a man, writes historian Rick Atkinson, the very image of an American Mars. But Schwarzkopf was no lumbering grunt. He could crack a joke and work a crowd. He

He could tangle with journalists, diplomats, and politicians with the precision and grace of a laser-guided bomb. He may have looked like a bouncer at a dive bar, but he was in possession of a quote, formidable intellect and an adhesive memory, according to one historian. And in the fall of 1990, that formidable intellect was unleashed on the problem of Saddam Hussein, Kuwait, and the Iraqi army. As the leader of Central Command, or CENTCOM, Schwarzenegger,

Schwarzkopf was in charge of all US military operations in the Middle East. And for Operation Desert Storm, he had direct oversight and command over any and all troops in the Persian Gulf. The Army, Marines, Air Force, and the Navy. There were some, however, who had their doubts about Schwarzkopf and whether he had the right temperament for such a delicate operation. Because Storm and Norman had a bit of a dark side. A gentle giant, he was not.

Schwarzkopf was absolutely notorious for his temper. As historian Bernard Traynor writes, quote, This was a guy who, according to Rick Atkinson, was prone to, quote,

One aide, writes Atkinson, quote, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney once commented in his trademark understated style that Schwarzkopf was, quote,

something of a screamer. All of this made Schwarzkopf a very polarizing figure within the chain of command. Few in the army felt neutral about Schwarzkopf, writes Bernard Treanor. They either liked him or loathed him. To his admirers, Schwarzkopf was a warrior. To his detractors, and there were many, he was a bully who commanded through intimidation and was too eager to grab the credit that belonged to others.

Although Schwarzkopf, to his credit, was at least aware of his reputation, he admitted that his tendency to blow up at his subordinates was, quote, without question, my major weakness as a commander. But for better or worse, Stormin Norman was the man chosen to destroy Saddam's army and liberate 20% of the world's oil. There were no doubts about the what or why of Operation Desert Storm, but in the fall of 1990, the biggest question mark for Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants was, how?

Because looking at all the facts on paper, this was not going to be easy. The American troops, as well-trained as they were, experienced no small amount of apprehension as they prepared to face the Iraqi army. As the Marine Anthony Swafford wrote in his book Jarhead, quote,

We look north toward what we're told is a menacing military. 400,000 or more war-torn and war-savvy men. Some of the Iraqi soldiers who fought during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war began tasting combat when they were 10 years old. The Iraqi dead totaled more than 120,000, with 30,000

with 300,000 or more wounded and 60,000 prisoners of war. An army capable of sustaining such damage and then invading another neighbor two years later sounds like a truly menacing force. And the civilian population that supports this army and its missions that accept such a staggering mutilation and loss of fathers and sons

must be extremely devoted to the country and the protection of its leader. While fighting Iran, the Iraqis became experts at fortifying their border using mines and obstacles, such as the 30-kilometer-long and 1,800-meter-wide artificial lake used to defend the city of Basra. And we're forced to wonder what the Iraqis are preparing for us at the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.

End quote. About the defenses, Swofford was more or less right. Since August, the Iraqi army had been very busy. Saddam Hussein had turned Kuwait into a fortress. Satellite images of the country showed layer after layer of infantry shredding defenses. Minefields, tank traps, and huge ribbons of razor wire scattered all across the desert. Beyond that were mortar, machine gun, and artillery installations. And beyond that were tanks, fighter jets, and APCs.

To deter an amphibious assault into Kuwait Bay, the Iraqis had even rigged oil tankers to explode and create a, quote, sea of fire, according to one historian. But the most feared, if not the most effective, weapon in Iraq's arsenal was their stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.

Since his takeover in 1979, Saddam Hussein had been steadily producing mustard gas and sarin nerve agents to deploy against his enemies. The first unfortunate souls to get a taste of that medicine were Iranian soldiers during Iraq's war against the Ayatollah in the 1980s. In a conflict already infamous for its high casualties and pointless butchery, the use of chemical agents added a terrifying new layer to the experience.

As the writer Con Coughlin puts it, "...nerve gas has the advantage of being odorless and colorless. It is easy to make and easy to spread, and it makes killing easy and efficient." By 1987, Saddam was comfortable using chemical weapons to put down dissent within the borders of his own country.

When the Kurds, an ethnic group in western Iraq, took advantage of the war with Iran to rise up in a bid for independence, the Iraqi army flooded their villages with huge clouds of nerve gas. In the village of Halabja, 5,000 people, men, women, and children, were killed in a single day. Needless to say, the U.S. military's task was going to be a daunting one.

As the pilot Buck Windham commented, quote, I am awfully glad not to be a U.S. Army soldier, facing the prospect of slogging through the sand and smoke, trying to cross a 10-foot deep pit of flaming crude oil while Iraqis shoot at you from the other side. I'll take my big, empty sky anytime.

To make matters worse, the casualty estimates coming out of the Pentagon were discouraging to say the least. A study by a D.C. think tank called the Center for Defense Information predicted that 10,000 American troops would be killed and 35,000 injured in a war that lasted four months.

The worst-case scenario, wrote one historian, visualized 30,000 military personnel dying in 20 days. And that potential for high casualties was the crux of Saddam's entire defensive strategy. As one historian described, quote,

A grinding battle of attrition, with high casualties on both sides that would nullify the American hopes to win a quick victory with high technology weapons. But Bush's coalition did experience one stroke of good luck in December when Saddam Hussein unexpectedly released the rest of the hostages he had taken. By the end of 1990, all the "foreign guests" had been returned to their home countries.

And whether Saddam was trying to buy a little time or gain sympathy from the international community, it is hard to say. But whatever his reasoning, the human shields were now officially off the board. One British hostage named John Chappelle remembered the plane ride back home after months of captivity. Quote, "'I remember we gave a little bit of a cheer as we took off, but the real cheer, that was when we landed at Gatwick.'" That's an airport near London. "'That really nearly blew the windows out.'"

The return of the hostages simplified the situation for Norman Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants. One less complication to deal with. But as they ruminated on all the other problems they faced, a plan began to take shape. A strategy that, if successful, would nullify all of Iraq's advantages and keep American casualties to a bare minimum. And it all started as a drawing on a chalkboard somewhere in CENTCOM HQ. At first glance, this drawing looked like a dartboard or a target.

It was just five rings, five concentric circles traced in thin white chalk. But despite its simplicity, the Five Rings Plan, as it was known in its infancy, represented a huge shift in conventional strategic thinking. Normally, when you fight a war, you prioritize going straight at the enemy army. You fight them, you starve them, you capture them, you kill them.

End of story. But the Five Rings strategy called for a focus on what the Army planners described as, quote, centers of gravity. The innermost circle, Rick Atkinson explains, stood for Iraqi leadership, the

End quote. End quote.

In other words, if we destroy the Iraqi army's ability to communicate with itself, the technological and strategic infrastructure it depends on to wage war, it won't matter how well-armed or well-prepared they are. Their capability to fight will simply collapse. An Air Force colonel named David Deptula put it more viscerally, quote,

Imagine a rock like a human body. What happens if you take away somebody's ability to think? Somebody's ability to communicate with the rest of the body? What happens if you sever their spinal cord? They can't function, right?

But what all of this meant, essentially, was that not only would the Iraqi army be a target, but Iraqi cities and towns and population centers as well. Dams and bridges and factories, water supplies and electrical grids. As an Air Force commander named Michael Dugan put it, quote, "...this wouldn't be a Vietnam-style operation nibbling around the edges. The way to hurt you is at home. It's not out in the woods somewhere."

But as the preparations for Operation Desert Storm proceeded from Schwarzkopf's bunker in Riyadh, fierce debates were taking place back home in America. Many U.S. politicians and representatives were hesitant to support a war in which thousands upon thousands of Americans might die. And for what? Lower oil prices? The investment portfolios of a few Gucci sheiks? Why don't we just let the sanctions take their toll, they argued.

Let Iraq's economy wither and die. Let the people rise up and depose Saddam Hussein for us. Why risk American lives at all? I see no compelling reason to rush military action, said Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. Of course, there are no guarantees on economic sanctions, but there are also no guarantees on war.

Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota agreed, quote, I could not accept the loss of life of any of our children in the Persian Gulf right now, and that tells me that in my gut, I do not believe that it's time to go to war. Even old hawks from the Vietnam era, like Robert McNamara, who had orchestrated the disastrous and fruitless strategy in Southeast Asia, were seriously gun-shy about Kuwait. McNamara argued, quote, Surely we should be prepared to extend the sanctions over a 12- or

If that offers an opportunity to achieve our political objective without the loss of American lives, who can doubt that a year of blockade will be cheaper than a week of war? The point is, it's going to be bloody. There are going to be thousands and thousands and thousands of casualties. All throughout December and the first week of January, U.S. representatives debated. Point and rebuttal, argument and counter-argument.

But on January 12th, 1991, the moment of truth finally arrived. The U.S. Congress was going to vote on whether America should go to war in the Persian Gulf. And just a mile and a half down the street from the Capitol building in the White House, George H.W. Bush agonized over what was about to happen. But the more he thought about it, the more convinced he was of the necessity of Operation Desert Storm. Congress is in a turmoil.

He told his diary. "'And I am more determined than ever to do what I have to do. If they are not going to bite the bullet, I am. I'm convinced that they will support us, provided it's fast and surgical. But if it's drawn out and long, well, then you'll have all the hand-wringers saying they shouldn't have done it, and they'll be after my neck.'

But at the end of the day, Bush was dead set on moving ahead with Operation Desert Storm. History, he believed, would ultimately vindicate him. Quote, If I don't get the votes, I'm going to do it anyway. And if I get impeached, so be it. A recorded vote. The yeas are 250, the nays are 183, and the joint resolution is adopted and without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. Gentlemen from New York, gentlemen from Illinois.

With the joint resolution passed, George Bush had his very own green light. Minutes later, a phone rang in Riyadh. General Norman Schwarzkopf and Operation Desert Storm were cleared to move forward. In three days, the United Nations deadline would elapse. And if Saddam Hussein's army wasn't out of Kuwait by midnight on January 15th, the coalition would attack. And if anyone thought that Iraq would cave to the threat of war and leave Kuwait before the deadline...

Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz made his nation's intentions clear. Quote, My youngest son is 11 years old. The experiences of his lifetime are exclusively confined to war, to expecting Iranian air raids and missiles. So, war is not something alien to us.

Well, folks, that is it for today's episode. Next time, in the third and final installment of this series, we'll jump right into the action of Desert Storm. We'll explore how the war was fought, how it was perceived at the time, and how it affected not only the soldiers in it, but the civilians caught in the crossfire. As always, thank you for your patience between episodes, and I hope you have an awesome day. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

Well, this goes on and on. So you see, the world's behind us, not like Vietnam, and this time our strike will be swift and deadly. Dangerous.

Now I know you're watching out there, Mr. Saddam Hussein. The time is running out on you. The deadline, the morning of January 15th, one month from today. When that morning dawns, you won't be hearing chirping birds. You'll be hearing something a little different, something more like this. Then nothing. Then you wait.

Then, kaboom! Then, then once again. Not, you're lucky it's a dud. Then, kaboom! Short fuse. And finally, the last thing you'll hear is you pass into oblivion live from New York. It's Saturday night!

♪

Hello everyone, my name is Matt Neglia and I am the host of the Next Best Picture podcast, part of the Film Entertainment Awards website, nextbestpicture.com. On our show, we explore all year long what is possibly going to win Best Picture at the Oscars. We do this by conducting interviews with people within the film industry, holding weekly reviews of the latest theatrical releases, and on our main show, where we dive into various different topics, answer your fan questions, and

and also do our best to explore Oscar history's past in hopes that it will tell us something new for this upcoming award season race. We hope that you will join us on all the various podcasting networks. We look forward to seeing you over at nextbestpicture.com.