It depends on what you mean by "fend off." The Iraqi leadership did not think they could win a pitched battle against the coalition forces, but they did believe that they could achieve a strategic victory or at least a stalemate. It's important to remember in this context that the ease of the coalition victory surprised even the Americans.

The Iraqi strategy rested on two premises. First, Iraqi strategists believed that the United States was deeply casualty averse and would be forced into a negotiated settlement if Iraq inflicted enough casualties. Saddam famously said before the war that the United States "could not accept 10,000 dead in a single battle" (unlike Iraq). Second, Iraqi strategists believed that, while they could not stop the coalition advance, they could make it slow enough and impose casualties to reach the point where the U.S. had suffered unacceptable losses.

The basic plan, then, was focused on imposing losses. The Iraqis operated under the presumption that the coalition would launch a direct frontal assault moving north from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait. Iraq fortified positions along this axis and stationed its strongest units (Republican Guard) to defend against this attack. The hope was that this could cause at least several thousand casualties and slow the Americans down to the point where either negotiation or mediation would ensue.

Ultimately, the U.S. defied expectations through what was known as the "left hook," flanking Iraqi forces to the west in the desert. This was an extremely effective maneuver, yielding the lopsided coalition victory with around one thousand coalition casualties (dead and wounded).

This probably raises the question: were the Iraqis crazy to think their strategy could work? The answer is no. In fact, the US commander Norman Schwarzkopf thought that the coalition would take 10,000 casualties in a frontal assault scenario, and the White House declared this unacceptable. Since the frontal assault never happened, it's not possible to assess whether this was "true," but the U.S. leadership shared the basic Iraqi assumptions about the frontal assault scenario. Independent analysts, also working from a frontal assault scenario, arrived at even higher numbers. Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), one of the most prominent Senate democrats on defense issues, believed the U.S. would take 10,000-20,000 casualties in the war and led a significant congressional resistance to the use of force (the Senate narrowly approved the use of force 52-47). The Iraqi military was large, well-equipped, and experienced (having just emerged from the Iran-Iraq War) so these views seemed very reasonable.

In the end, the Iraqis were undone by a few factors. First, they never imagined the left hook scenario (which succeeded even better than planned). Second, both the Iraqis and the Americans underestimated the degree of American technological superiority and its battlefield effects. Even for the "left hook", Schwartzkopf overestimated the coalition losses by a factor of about 3.

Sources/Further Reading

-Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf. Probably still the best general history of the military aspects of the Gulf War.

-David Lindsey, "Military Strategy, Private Information, and War" (article, ungated link). This is a political science article, so much of it is not relevant, but pp. 636-637 lay out what the Iraqis and Americans believed before the war and how this gave rise to strategic tensions.

-Daryl Press, The Myth of Air Power in the Persian Gulf War and the Future of Warfare (article, ungated link). Aims to disprove the idea that the American victory was mostly about airpower and provides a strategic analysis of the factors leading to victory.