During Operation Desert Storm, why did the US led coalition decided to stop all military activity, once Kuwait was liberated from Iraqi forces? Other than sanctions imposed against Iraq, why didn't the coalition pursue Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party, all the way to Baghdad?

by xenomoft
Jan_van_Bergen

I'll let George H.W. Bush explain his reasoning himself. In an article that appeared (and subsequently disappeared) in Time Magazine on March 2, 1998, George H.W. Bush and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft penned their reason under the title, "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam". The full text can be found here. (The article is suspiciously missing from Time's own database, which is another story in and of itself.)

Among the highlights of Bush's own reasoning against overthrowing Saddam:

  1. Fear of the breakup of the Iraqi state.
  2. Fear of "mission creep" - the original goal had been to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait. "Mission creep" is when the goals of a mission change before the mission ends. This could lead, in theory, to never-ending conflict.
  3. A lack of a desire to rule Iraq outright, along with the accompanying costs - both human and material, accompanied by the realization the overthrowing Saddam would likely require such a US role.
  4. They were consciously trying to set a pattern for the use of force in a post-Cold War, unipolar world. Exceeding the UN mandate would have set a bad precedent for the future, a precedent the US was in a unique position to set and cared greatly about getting correct.
  5. There was no end game. Had they overthrown Saddam, it was conceivable that the US would still (in 1998) be an occupying force in Iraq.
  6. A quick pull out helped mollify Arab states, who were justifiably worried that the United States would not leave once it arrived. Pulling out and back to bases that they [the Arab states] had agreed to lease to the United States helped ease these tensions and create mutual trust between the United States and those Arab regimes.

EDIT: I should also mention that the UN mandate calling for the use of force only included expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait, not an invasion of Iraq itself. So technically, further action would have been illegal under international law. Here's a link to that UN Security Council Resolution.

EDIT 2: a few words for clarity's sake.

rkoloeg

You might be interested in Gen. Schwarzkopf's hour-long debriefing from the end of the military campaign, on Youtube. At about 41 minutes they briefly address the same area of questioning as your post.