Military history stands in an odd place within history. Many factors, such as the economy, military size, diplomacy, and politics contribute differently to the outcome. Wars are studied not as a single event but from different perspectives, with objectivity being one of the main criteria. The obvious military superiority the United States had would not make anyone question the coalition's victory. It is not completely useful to ask the question whether if the coalition expected to win so easily; a better question would be to ask how this shaped decision making in the U.S. and Iraqi circles. Before we begin, we must start at the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988).

In the later summer of 1988, Ba'athist Iraq emerged as the primary military power in the Gulf. Baghdad had four times as many tanks, armored vehicles, and cannons and six times as many combat aircraft as Tehran. After the last Iraqi offensive into Iran, the Iraqi army now comprised fifty divisions, around a total of one million active soldiers.^1 The Iraqi army was now also three times stronger than all of the Gulf Cooperation Council's armies put together. The oil monarchies reached a conclusion that they needed to buy more weapons and accept Western military forces on their soil to protect themselves from Iran's revenge and Iraq's growing hegemony in the Gulf.

Iraq's "victory" in the Iran-Iraq war allowed Saddam Hussein discovered a newfound interest for military matters, which would later lead him bypass his chiefs of staff. Saddam believed he was competent enough to do without his general's advice, and would ultimately make the disastrous decision to invade Kuwait. He was convinced that his fierce determination had led to his victory over Iran and that he had been right to yield. He considered that the United States had inconstant, showing its weak character and fickleness, by being indecisive in punishing Iran with their attacks on Gulf shipping. He also believed the Gulf monarchies would never dare to contest his leadership.

Shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990, Saddam quickly made efforts to court Iran. On August 14th, he publicly agreed to all of Iran's conditions for a formal end of the Iran-Iraq war, including the reaffirmation of the Algiers Agreement border in the Shatt al-Arab. This allowed Saddam to consolidate most of his forces on the Kuwait/Saudi-Iraqi border without fear of a Iranian invasion on the eastern border.

As early as October 1990, many American decision-makers were beginning to question whether the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the U.N. Security Council could induce Saddam to withdraw. In late October, the Bush administration decided to double the number of American forces in the region, to approximately 500,000 in order to provide an offensive option against Iraq. Perhaps an overreaction, this was intended to maintain the coalition's unity in support of the use of military force against Iraq, and to gain public and congressional support in the U.S.

To deal the final blow, the ground war began on February 24th with coalition forces smashing the dispirited Iraqi resistance and pushing Kuwait and southern Iraq. On February 25th, Baghdad Radio announced that Iraq had ordered its army to withdraw from Kuwait. By February 27th, coalition forces reached Kuwait City. President Bush ordered a halt to the offensive, to take effect at midnight in the morning of February 28th. The ground war lasted 100 hours after it began. It subsequently became clear that the magnitude of the coalition victory was not as overwhelming as it appeared at the time. General Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander, told the press that the coalition forces trapped two Republican Guard divisions with 700 tanks.

Kuwait had been liberated with minimal coalition causalities. Total coalition battle deaths for the entire Iraqi operation, from the beginning of the air war, were only 240 (776 wounded). With by far the largest contingent in the coalition, the U.S. forces took a majority of those causalities, with 148 death (458 wounded). It is impossible to estimate with any degree of accuracy Iraqi military causalities, or to separate war death with those that occurred during the uprising after the war. One reputable source, admitting that its estimate was based on circumstantial evidence, estimates total Iraqi battle deaths during the entire war at 35,000.^2 In the face of the coalition's air campaign that started on January 16th 1991, most of the Iraqi air force flew to Iran in late January and early February 1991. The Iranian government impounded the planes, later claiming them as reparations for the Iran-Iraq war.

The narrative of "Iraq's defeat" in the Gulf War depends on who is telling the story. The amassing of military forces at the end of the Iran-Iraq war made it appear that Iraq had a cohesive and strong army as it managed to drive Iran back into their territory. But the narrative becomes diverges from here. On the one hand, the coalition performed a stunning victory that retook Kuwait within four days. Nobody would have doubted the coalition's victory, the majority of the world's nation against Saddam.

On the other hand, Saddam became an isolated hero for those equally at odds with American power. Saddam had survived from the initial air campaign. The Iraqi army did not fight the coalition like they did against Iran, either because of low morale or a "tactical retreat", which Saddam then justified that the Iraqi army did not show its full potential. He crushed the subsequent revolts in Iraq that tried to overthrow him after Operation Desert Storm. The United States refused to invade Iraq and usurp Saddam from power. His survival was proof, he boasted, of his military prowess, political power, and despite the loss of Kuwaiti territory briefly under his control, his ultimate victory in the Gulf War.

 

Endnotes:

1. Iran's generals announced that it would take them ten years to regain strategic parity with Iraq, which they estimated would require the acquisition of 2500 tanks, 2000 artillery pieces and several hundred combat aircraft.

2. Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict: 1990-1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 408.

 

Sources:

Engel, Jeffrey A., and Ryan C. Crocker. Into the Desert Reflections on the Gulf War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Freedman, Lawrence, and Efraim Karsh. The Gulf Conflict: 1990-1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Gause, F. Gregory. The International Relations of the Persian Gulf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Pirnie, Bruce R., John Gordon, Richard R. Brennan, Forrest E. Morgan, Alexander C. Hou, and Chad Yost. "Air Operations." In Operation IRAQI FREEDOM: Decisive War, Elusive Peace, edited by Perry Walter L., Darilek Richard E., Rohn Laurinda L., and Sollinger Jerry M., 149-82. RAND Corporation, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt19w72gs.13.

Razoux, Pierre. The Iran-Iraq war. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015.

Edit: Grammar

If I might add a related question: I've heard that one of the reason it was so quick and brutal was that the US was eager to field test lots of new weapon systems. Is there any truth to this?

There's one interpretation I've always held which I'll ask as a follow-on question: was the overestimation a deliberate attempt at misdirection? I recall a lot of news coverage of the amphibious landing option, and there was a large amount of shore bombardment and talk of a pending assault, house-to-house fighting and so on, but essentially no mention of the armored flank. The military exercised a lot of control over the press, and it seemed like they slanted coverage towards non-options.