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The USA for its reputation as the "typical" representative of the West and its ideologies and best-armed and best-trained strike forces turned out to be this outside nation. Together with some other countries of the Occident and of the Middle East, it freed Kuwait from its enemy aggressor by force.
The allies can be roughly devided into two groups: the ones who only supported the rest with money or logistic equipment and did not send any troops to Iraq, like Japan and Germany and the others who actively took part in battle and fought side by side with the USA in the name of the UN, like Great Britain, France and Saudi-Arabia.
Saudi-Arabia, however, was a exception in that case because it both paid, together with Kuwait, a large amount of money and fought in the war by sending soldiers to Iraq as well as permitting the allies to land their fighter airplanes at airports in Saudi-Arabia.
Although all the allied governments and the UN pointed out that aggression from one government to another was something vehemently to be proceeded against and punished and that this was their declared aim, it became clear very quickly that those praiseworthy intentions were also mainly directed by economic thoughts: "(...) Des 1992 abgewählten amerikanischen Präsidenten (...) George Bush zufolge sollte das primäre Ziel der USA bei der Kriegsführung die Verteidigung der Rechtsnormen und der Werte der zivilisierten Welt sein."
But this was only a pretence for the allies in order not to have to reveal the real background to the public. No nation would have risked either the lives of its soldiers and military equipment or a big amount of money, if there had not been at least a few economic advantages for the nation, for example the stability in the Gulf region in order to guarantee a stable oil price or the belief of some Gulf states in the Western system in order to guarantee a continuity of the trade with these states.
The thought of a war in the Gulf because of oil evoked vivid memories of the two oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979 in a lot of peoples` heads. Then the oil price multiplied itself by four within a few months. This had lasting effects on the world economy, especially on the weak economy of the Third World. By this, the whole world was also confrontated with its dependance on the oil producing and exporting countries, which to a high degree were and still are countries from the Gulf region. Most Western nations lost sight of this dependance and took their prosperity too much for granted, which to reveal was the intention of the oil producing and exporting countries. This was one reason for most countries to take part in the Gulf war, either by only paying for it or even sending troops down there to help the USA.
In contrast to the economic reasons, for most allied countries there was also the duty of going to war against Iraq because of their membership to the UN, which could not let Iraq get away with an annexation of Kuwait and a violation of basic rights without imposing any sanctions on the its regime.
Nevertheless, there were no plans of killing Saddam Hussein after a successful intervention because the allies did not want Iraq to get split up into different areas of different religious groups, which, untill then, were controlled by Saddam Hussein. Those groups, some of them even militant, would have again endangered the stability and thus the safety of that region and its oil. So the allies did not want to jeopardize another war "Made in Iraq" which might have been even more unpredictable for the economy than this one was.
The USA, as the leader of the multi-national strike forces, has not been surprised by the situation of being in this position, for it knew it had the best military knowledge and equipment of all the allies. But nevertheless, there had been the problem of identification with this role at the beginning of war. Whereas there had been no doubt about the fact that the US was predestined for that role because of its logistic and military presuppositions, its population did not want to play the "world police" for other countries anymore.
The USA, with its 250 million citizens, had so many other problems but war at that time that it took the population longer than in any other war it had been involved in before to accept the situation. "Eine zunehmend tiefe Rezession, eine strukturell kranke Wirtschaft, die Spätfolgen des Spekulationsfiebers in den achtziger Jahren, ein marodes Bildungssystem, ein gefährlich labiles Bankensystem und eine international geschwächte Wettbewerbsfähigkeit. Kein einziges dieser Probleme wird durch den Krieg gelöst." The USA suffered from a bad recession and one remedy for it seemed to be the Gulf war. The government saw the chance of solving two problems at the same time: Firstly, it wanted to protect and, if necessary, restall the balance of the Gulf region and within the OPEC. Secondly, it thought it could end recession by reanimating its economy with a war.
Besides, the USA still had not forgotten about the Vietnam War, which was a bitter pill for it to swallow because it was more or less the only war in US history which the USA had to admit to have lost. And since this was the last war the US actively fought in, it was still fresh on the public mind. Therefore the Gulf war for the US also was the opportunity of curing itself from the "Vietnam-Syndrome", which it succeeded in.
Similarly important was the fact that Iraq, due to a lot of mostly Western countries, as mentioned above, was enabled to build its own nuclear bomb. The CIA found out that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of finishing the bomb. This of course would have had serious consequences on the world`s political and economic status quo. One just has to imagine Saddam Hussein blackmailing the rest of the world by threatening it with the nuclear bomb. It would have led to catastrophic states. That was the situation the USA, like all the rest of the world, wanted to keep from coming into existence and therefore had to intervene.
Domestic policies also played an overwhelming role in the background of the war. All political leaders in a democracy long for re-election and try very hard to reach this aim. That was just what George Bush, then President of the United States of America, did. During the Gulf crisis, however, it became clear that war was not the best way to lead a nation out of a recession.
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the armament of the allies by American companies and the outbreak of the Gulf war "(...) on Day One sent stocks skyrocketing (...)" . Especially the stocks of the armament industry jumped to a higher price level within a few days.
Raytheon in Massachusetts, for example, the producer of the Patriot anti-missile missiles, those ground-to-air missiles which were needed to intercept the Scud missiles heading for Israel and Saudi-Arabia, profited from this war-boom. But not only the preparations for this war "(...) accelerate[d] America`s recovery from recession."20 Likewise it is important to mention that, after discovering that Scud missiles were already produced in more than twelve other countries, the Pentagon, the US Department of Defense, declared that new missiles and anti-missile-misslies had to be built, "(...) die Schutz vor Raketenangriffen aller Art von wo auch immer bieten." While the actual conflict had not been over yet, the USA found another positive aspect of it, namely the opportunity of getting prepared for the next war with even better and more accurate weapons. The war in the Gulf, where "(...) der Irak zu einem Testgelände für ein Arsenal modernster Waffensysteme wurde" , had introduced a small boom for the armament industry and had made the companies think about more effective weapons to fight with in this new era of high tech war.
But despite all high tech shows in the Gulf, one important factor should not be forgotten, whose consequences and influences on the outcome of war and therefore on the world economy made up a big part of the whole planning and organization of the intervention, that is time. The length of the war has been decisive for the sort and extent of the consequences: a short war could have been followed by the re-election of the President of the USA, whereas a long crisis surely would have "punished" the "Western warlord". A short war could also have brought some positive atmosphere into the economy, helping it to overcome recession, although it had to be clear that the war would not have solved the rest of the American problems which had been, as shown above, quite a few.
George Bush had to end the conflict successfully within only a few months and, without further ado, strengthen the American economy in order to absolutely succeed in that situation. For those reasons, he had to fight on two fronts: on the front line in the Gulf and on the home front, which was almost as important as the actual battle in Iraq. The population at home, more than the soldiers who simply had to do their jobs, had to be convinced of the accuracy of home-made weapons and the necessity of the war. The government knew of the importance of mass media as an instrument to provide its population with daily pro-American and pro-war material such as pictures showing American missiles and bombs hitting, for example, the entrance of a Iraqi building without killing any civilists. So not only the military industry profited from the war but also the US media. "Seit (...) [Kriegsausbruch] haben sich die Einschaltquoten mehr als verdoppelt" , was the comment of news channel Cable News Network (CNN), for instance, whose correspondents voluntarily stayed right in the eye of the storm, namely Bagdad, to keep their viewers in touch with the latest news from the battle field.
In spite of all these efforts, President Bush did not manage to remain in office, although he won the Gulf war in less than two months, which once again proves the fact that "Politiker, die Kriege beginnen, (...) in den seltensten Fällen dafür belohnt [werden] (...)"
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