1991 – Britain Joins Gulf War and Still Misses the Penalties at Home

John Major Sends Troops to Kuwait, Nation Discovers It Has Strong Feelings About Both

Britain Joins Gulf War and Still Misses the Penalties at Home

John Major Sends Troops to Kuwait, Nation Discovers It Has Strong Feelings About Both

In January 1991, Britain joined the United States and a coalition of thirty-four nations in the military operation to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which Saddam Hussein had invaded with the confident expectation that the international community would respond with the comprehensive inaction that had characterised its response to his previous adventures. This expectation proved incorrect. The international community responded with 500,000 troops, the most intensive aerial bombardment since Vietnam, and a ground campaign that lasted exactly one hundred hours before Kuwait was liberated and the coalition declared victory.

Britain’s contribution — 45,000 military personnel, the largest deployment since the Falklands — was conducted under the command of General Sir Peter de la Billière, who had the specific challenge of integrating British forces into an American-led coalition while maintaining enough distinctiveness to justify the political narrative that this was an allied effort rather than a British appendage to American foreign policy. The challenge was managed with professional skill. The military campaign was a comprehensive success. The political aftermath — Saddam remaining in power, the Shia uprising being left to be crushed, the Kurdish question unresolved — was a comprehensive example of the difficulties that accompany winning a war whose stated objectives do not include the removal of the regime that started it.

John Major, eleven weeks into his premiership, handled his first international crisis with a steadiness that surprised observers who had expected the quiet man from Brixton to be overwhelmed by the scale of the stage. He was not overwhelmed. He was, in fact, rather good at foreign policy — better, some argued, than at the domestic management that the inherited poll tax crisis and the approaching ERM difficulties were going to require.

The Context: Kuwait, Saddam, and the New World Order

Iraq had invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990, six months before the military response, in an act of territorial annexation that Saddam presented as the rectification of a historical injustice — Kuwait, he argued, was properly the nineteenth province of Iraq, separated by British colonial mapmaking. The argument was not without historical complexity, which did not prevent the UN Security Council from passing Resolution 678 in November 1990, authorising the use of all necessary means to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty if Iraq had not withdrawn by 15 January 1991.

Iraq had not withdrawn by 15 January 1991. Operation Desert Storm began on 17 January with an aerial campaign that demonstrated the transformation of military technology in the decade since the Falklands — precision-guided munitions, stealth aircraft, satellite navigation, the whole architecture of what was being called the Revolution in Military Affairs, applied to a conventional army that had not encountered it before and was not equipped to survive the encounter.

The BBC and CNN broadcast the war in real time, which was a novelty of such significance that it transformed the public experience of military conflict permanently. Viewers watching tracer fire over Baghdad from the perspective of a hotel camera were simultaneously more informed and less informed about what was happening than audiences of any previous war — more informed because the images were immediate, less informed because the images were selective, dramatic, and conveyed the aesthetics of precision warfare without the human costs that lay beyond the frame.

British Forces: The Professional Military in Action

The British Army of the Rhine, the armoured formations that had spent forty years preparing to fight the Soviet Union across the North German Plain, found themselves instead fighting across the Kuwaiti desert in a campaign that their training had, unexpectedly, prepared them for rather well. The combined arms doctrine — tanks and infantry and artillery operating together under air cover — that NATO had developed for the European theatre translated effectively to the desert, with the addition of sand, heat, and the specific challenge of maintaining equipment in conditions for which it had not been designed.

The 1st Armoured Division, attached to the US VII Corps, participated in the ground campaign’s left hook — the flanking movement that went around and through the Iraqi desert rather than into the fortified positions along the Kuwait border. The hundred-hour ground war produced a decisive outcome and relatively light coalition casualties — forty-seven British deaths in the conflict, a number that the professional military bore with the specific stoicism of people who understand that their profession involves the possibility of death and who regard that understanding as part of the commitment they have made.

The ceasefire was declared on 28 February 1991. Kuwait was liberated. Saddam Hussein remained in Baghdad. The decision not to advance to Baghdad and remove him — taken by Bush, endorsed by Major, justified on the grounds of the coalition’s limited mandate and the instability that would follow regime change — was the decision that twelve years later, under different circumstances and different leaders, was revisited with consequences that the original decision’s architects had specifically wished to avoid.

Italia 90 and the Penalties That Still Hurt

The Gulf War was not the only occasion in 1990-91 when Britain had strong feelings about outcomes it could not control. The Italia 90 World Cup, played in the summer of 1990, had produced England’s best tournament performance since 1966 and ended in a semi-final penalty shootout defeat to West Germany that established, or rather confirmed and formalised, the specific relationship between England and penalty shootouts that has persisted with agonising consistency ever since.

Paul Gascoigne’s tears, shed when he received the booking that would have kept him out of the final had England reached it, became the image of the tournament and the image of a shift in British emotional culture — the moment when a footballer’s tears were received not with embarrassment but with collective feeling, when the performance of male vulnerability on a public stage was accepted rather than dismissed. Gazza’s tears were the cultural moment when it became acceptable, in England, for men to cry at football, which was either a significant loosening of the emotional corset or the beginning of a sentimentality that subsequent decades have deployed with diminishing discrimination.

The penalties were missed. Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle missed them. The nation watched. The nation groaned. The nation went home from the pub and had the kind of feelings about a sporting result that it had not previously acknowledged having about sporting results, because the tournament had done something that only the best tournaments do — made the audience care enough about the outcome to be genuinely distressed by the wrong one.

John Major’s New World Order Problem

George Bush Senior had described the post-Cold War environment as a New World Order — a phrase that suggested the collapse of Soviet power would produce a more stable, more law-governed, more cooperative international system, in which the United Nations could function as its founders had intended and in which the community of nations would respond collectively to violations of international law with the clarity that the Gulf War coalition had demonstrated.

The New World Order lasted until the evidence from Bosnia arrived, at which point it became clear that the international community’s willingness to act collectively against aggression was conditional on factors — oil, alliance politics, public opinion, television coverage — that bore no consistent relationship to the scale of the human rights violation involved. Kuwait had oil and a powerful American patron. Bosnia had neither, initially, and the response of the international community to its disintegration was correspondingly different in character and timeliness.

Major’s Britain would spend much of the early 1990s engaged with Bosnia — with the question of whether, and how, and under what authority, European states should intervene in a civil war that was producing atrocities on European soil for the first time since 1945. The answers produced were inadequate, in the judgement of most subsequent analysts, and the inadequacy was the product not of malice but of the specific difficulty of collective action when the collective has not agreed on its objectives or its limits.

The Gulf War had suggested that collective action was possible and effective. Bosnia would suggest that the conditions for the Gulf War coalition — a clear aggressor, a clear victim, a clear objective, a Security Council willing to authorise force — were specific rather than general. The New World Order was, like most orders, rather more complicated than its name suggested.

Britain had joined the Gulf War and won. England had reached the World Cup semi-final and lost on penalties. The year 1991 was, in this sense, a compressed version of the national experience — competent in the large things, heartbroken in the specific ones, carrying both outcomes with the specific British combination of pride and resignation that the subsequent decades would not substantially alter.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990. Operation Desert Storm began on 17 January 1991; the ground campaign lasted 100 hours before Kuwait was liberated and a ceasefire declared on 28 February. Britain contributed 45,000 military personnel under General Sir Peter de la Billière, attached to the US VII Corps. Forty-seven British service personnel died in the conflict. Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq until the 2003 invasion. England reached the semi-finals of the Italia 90 World Cup in July 1990, losing to West Germany on penalties; Paul Gascoigne’s tears during the match became one of the most iconic images of the tournament. John Major became Prime Minister on 28 November 1990, succeeding Margaret Thatcher. Britain joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism in October 1990 and was forced to withdraw on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 17 January 1991 (London, UK)

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]