The United States 's Operation Desert Shield

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The United States launched an operation known as Operation Desert Shield, also known as the Persian Gulf War, in August of 1990 in response to Saddam Hussein’s order to the Iraqi forces to take over Kuwait. President George Herbert Walker Bush made the decision to send American troops to Saudi Arabia to form an international coalition that would eventually turn into an operation known as Operation Desert Storm. The United States Army had not witnessed an event of such international and Homefront importation since the Cold War.
Saddam Hussein’s main purpose of sending troops to take over Kuwait was to take control of their oil fields, which Hussein believed would be an easy task; however, he failed to understand that the United States and United Nations were keeping a very close watch on the Iraqi’s actions. Hussein also had other motives, such as freeing himself from the debt he was drowning in from the Iran-Iraq War just two years earlier. He set the pretense for war with Kuwait by defining their refusal to give land to Iraq as an act of military belligerence. President Bush ordered the United States to respond just five days after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. If the United States had not taken action, Hussein would have possibly continued to invade other oil producing countries and take control of the United States main sources of oil as well as threaten a number of innocent people’s lives.
Operation Desert Shield was launched by President H.W. Bush to increase the amount of forces and troops in areas surrounding Kuwait and mainly in Saudi Arabia in response to the 120,000 troops and 2,000 tanks invading Kuwait. The United Nations called for the Iraqi army’s extraction from their presence in Kuwait, however Hussein went ag...

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...cleanly ending the war was the wrong way to approach the end of war because there were so many open ends with the Iraqis that could possibly lead to conflict in the future; however since the war was expensive, costing 620 billion dollars, and because three hundred ninety American soldiers had already died. After tying up loose ends with handling the Iraqi army and their leader Hussein, General Schwarzkopf, who played a major role and served as a key leader to the American army during Operation Desert Shield and Storm, made his way to where Saddam Hussein was so he could witness his surrender, however Hussein’s actions to follow this event required President Bush to put in place “no-fly zones” to protect the Kurds in Northern Iraq and the Shiites in the South. Eventually Operation Desert Storm, the biggest military operation since Vietnam, came to a successful end.

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