This month marks the end of what Saddam Hussein called “The Mother of all Battles.” We, at the spearhead of a multinational army, went in to save the small nation of Kuwait from a larger invader. After less than a month, that invader, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, was ejected from Kuwait and his vaunted armies smashed. However, Hussein was never made to answer for his crimes in an international court. His war crimes and shattering of international treaties, still ongoing, are some of the most unconscionable acts this world can witness. It is high time, now, 10 years after the war to finish the job: Arrest Hussein, and bring him to trial for his crimes.
In a war, one of the immediate goals of any army is to neutralize its opponent. This the U.N. coalition did handily. In one post-war report, the U.S. Army stated that only two of Iraq’s 42 divisions were still in any shape to fight. However, the aftermath of a war also has to address the root cause of the conflict and remove it. It was here that we failed miserably. We did not remove the cause of the war: Hussein himself, the leader of the Baath party and dictator of Iraq.
Hussein has committed numerous breaches of international law during his two decades in power. In the vicious 1980-1988 border conflict between Iraq and Iran, a war that laid the foundation for Kuwait’s invasion, Hussein made large use of chemical weapons, including the nerve gas sarin, on enemy troops. This is a direct violation of the Geneva Protocol, which applies to all nations. Sarin has also been used by Hussein on a large scale to eliminate ethnic or religious minorities within Iraq itself that he felt were threats to his power. Two major groups destroyed in this way from 1986 to the present are the Kurdish minorities in the north and Shiite Muslims (one of the two main branches of Islam; Hussein is a Sunni) in the south.
When the war ended, U.S. aid to forces poised to depose Hussein from within was hamhanded, to say the least. More than $100 million was spent by the CIA to equip and encourage traditional anti-Hussein forces to revolt. The returns were disproportionately small. Other than some small running battles with Iraqi forces, the only other defining result of the plan, according to The Washington Post, was that one of the CIA-aided groups turned traitor and aided Hussein in slaughtering their comrades. Hussein has only increased his grip on power in Iraq since the end of the war. Sanctions placed on the nation have restricted his reach, but not his ambition.
It is now 10 years later. Kuwait is free. However, so is Hussein. We would like to think the Gulf War is over, but it isn’t. We are, at this moment, only in the middle of a prolonged armistice. We will not have a full victory until the Hussein family is out of power in Iraq. There can be no victory until the perpetrator is made to answer for his crimes.