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The Anschluss

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JohnBulloch and HarveyMorris, Saddam's War: The Origins of the Kuwait Conflict and the International Response, London, Faber, 1991.
Cambridge International Documents Series, The Kuwait Crisis, vols. 1 (‘Basic Documents’) and 2 (‘Sanctions and their Economic Consequences’), Cambridge, Grotius, 1991.
AdelDarwish and GregoryAlexander, Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War, London, Gollancz, 1991.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Alex Danchev
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Extract

Historical analogies

On 2 August 1990, much to everyone's surprise, Hitler invaded Kuwait. The ensuing conflict was mired in history—as Francis Fukuyama might say—or at least in historical analogy. The ruling analogy was with the Second World War; more exactly, with the origins and nature of that war. George Bush's constant reference during the Second Gulf War was Martin Gilbert's Second World War, a monumental construction well described as ‘a bleak, desolate evocation of the horrors of war, a modern Waste Land, an unremitting catalogue of killing, atrocity and exiguous survival’. The paperback edition of this exacting volume weighs three pounds. The text runs to 747 pages. Understandably, the President stashed his copy on board Air Force One. ‘I'm reading a book’, he informed an audience in Burlington, Vermont, in October 1990, ‘and it's a book of history, a great, big, thick history of World War II, and there's a parallel between what Hitler did to Poland and what Saddam Hussein has done to Kuwait’. As Paul Fussell has reminded us, the wartime refrain was Remember Pearl Harbor. “ ‘No one ever shouted or sang Remember Poland’? Not until 1990, that is. Of course, Bush himself had served in that war, as he was not slow to remind the electorate: he flew fifty-eight missions as a pilot in the Pacific. For those who wondered what he knew of Poland, Gilbert's book—at once a chronicle of remembrance and an indictment—told him this:

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Review Article
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Review of International Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 1994, pp. 97 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1994

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References

1 Overy, Richard, ‘Poor Man's War’, London Review of Books, 12 October 1989Google Scholar. See Gilbert, Martin, Second World War (London, 1989)Google Scholar.

2 New York Times, 24 October 1990Google Scholar. Cf. Massing, Michael, ‘The Way to War’, New York Review of Books, 28 March 1991Google Scholar; Smith, Jean Edward, George Bush's War (New York, 1992), pp. 1992), pp. 1992), pp. 2–3, 195Google Scholar.

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6 ‘The Arabian Peninsula: US Principles’, address to the nation, 8 August 1990, United States Information Service (USIS).

7 ‘America's Stand Against Aggression’, address to the 91st national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Baltimore, Maryland, 20 August 1990, USIS. Cavalierly, the President also mentioned Anzio, Inchon, and Hamburger Hill.

8 Quoted in Massing, ‘Way to War’.

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25 State of the Union speech, 29 January 1991, quoted in Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict, p. xxix, the opening page of the book.

26 The term is William Bundy's. See Khong, Analogies at War, p. 189.

27 Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict, p. 438. See also pp. xxix–xxxv and 73–6.

28 From ‘The Theory of Limited War’, in Alex Danchev and Dan Keohane (eds.), International Perspectives on the Gulf Conflict 1990–1991 (forthcoming). Cf. Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict, pp. 438–9.

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41 Quoted in Ascherson, ‘Middle–of–the–Road Warmonger’. With regard to the 1991 war itself, such fears have not been realized. The latest estimates of Iraqi casualties, civilian and military, have plummeted, though they remain shockingly imprecise. See Heidenrich, John G., ‘The Gulf War: How Many Iraqis Died?’, Foreign Policy, 90 (1993), pp. 108–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The author is a former analyst with the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

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47 Anonymous adviser quoted in J. F. O. Mcallister, ‘The Lessons of Iraq’, Time, 2 November 1992; Bush quoted in Draper, ‘True History’ (1l9 above).