Why did america intervene in the gulf war of 1991 and not the iran-iraq war before then?
The U.S. wanted to stay behind the scenes to influence the war by giving major money and other perks to Iraq to make it look like Iraq’s “win” was legitimate. If the U.S. had actually declared itself involved, it would’ve become obvious to the world that the U.S. was just trying to keep other countries – and their anti-American or anti-free-trade leaders – under its thumb.
Part of it was Kuwait being friendlier with the west, the other part was the simple fact that Kuwait was unable to defend itself from Iraq, a growing and burgeoning military at the time, and we didn’t want to allow them to gain more resources for their stated intentions. After the war and accompanying sanctions the threat was taken care of.
The war between Iran and Iraq was viewed contemporarily as a war between two belligerents, with Iran being the worse of two evils, having in the not so recent past disregarded all commonly accepted diplomatic laws by holding U.S. diplomats hostage for over a year. They’d been taunting each other and egging each other on for quite some time, and “let ’em fight it out” was the general consensus of the rest of the world. It was one of those regional conflicts that was a no-win scenario for any other party to actively intervene in. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was not the same thing. Kuwait was not antagonizing Iraq. Iraq just wanted Kuwait, and so invaded it. I personally see a distinct difference between the two events. Now, would the U.S. and the rest of the world rushed to the aid of Kuwait, had Kuwait not been oil rich? I doubt it. There probably would have been a lot of diplomatic hand-wringing and useless embargos, etc., but not much real action. But Kuwait has a resource that is essen
Actually, we did intervene in the Iran-Iraq War of the 80’s. We just did it under the table. But America supplied weapons to both sides during that war; but most of the weaponry went to Saddam Hussein (biological weapons among them). We were simply more open about it during the Gulf War. And it probably had a lot more to do with the Public Relations boost of it (helping out a small country in trouble) then it had to do with oil. We were getting more oil out of Iraq, after all.
