Taking virtually the entire world by surprise, Iraqi armed forces invaded the small oil-rich sheikdom of Kuwait on August 1. Kuwait's small forces were no match for Iraq's huge army of up to a million men, equipped with 750 combat aircraft and more than 5,000 tanks. Within five hours, all major government buildings and most military installations were under Iraqi military control, and the ruling al-Sabah family had fled to refuge in neighboring Saudi Arabia.
According to the Iraqi government, a native revolution against the al-Sabah regime had taken place, and Iraqi forces were merely responding to a plea for aid to restore order. But the flimsiness of this pretext was plain to all: The nine-man ruling revolutionary provisional Kuwaiti government was made up entirely of Iraqi military men and led by a son-in-low of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Not a single Kuwaiti quisling could be found a tribute to any ruler, especially a monarch in the twentieth century.
The reaction to the invasion in most of the world was one of outrage and defiance. Iraq invaded Kuwait only hours after it broke off negotiations, held in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, to resolve outstanding differences, reminding Americans of the attack on Pearl Harbor even as Japanese diplomats were leaving U.S. soil. Saddam Hussein had not only promised the world publicly during the two weeks of precrisis tension that there would be no war, he also privately gave the same assurance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan's King Hussein and Saudi Arabian King Fahd ibn-Abdul Aziz.
The response to the aggression in the Arab world was mixed. Gulf Arabs were horrified, Egyptians were stunned, and Syrians were astonished. But the man on the street in many areas outside of oil rich Arabia - in Jordan, in Yemen, and certainly in Iraq - was generally delighted. Arab resentment of those whom they believed to be indulgent, oil-rich, and selfish was high, and Saddam Hussein, by merely not losing the eight year Gulf war against Iran, became the symbol of an Arab ready to take up arms to fight the real and imagined enemies of the idealized Arab nation. These differences between Arab peoples and their regimes, and between some regimes and others, demonstrated for all the world to see the wide gulfs plaguing the Arab world despite endless rhetorical professions of solidarity, brotherhood, and unity. As a result, Arab foreign ministers and the Arab League, many of its members intimidated by Iraqi power and terrified by Iraqi threats, failed to condemn the invasion or take any resolute steps against it.
Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, still claiming that the invasion had been invited by Kuwaiti revolutionaries, promised a pull out beginning August 5. Instead, more Iraqi forces poured into Kuwait and moved south toward the Saudi Arabian border, and Saddam announced the annexation of Kuwait. Within a week after the initial attack, more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were poised on that frontier, just 40 miles from rich Saudi oil fields, only 100 miles from the path of the Transarabian pipeline, and only 175 miles from Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia's main loading platform for its oil. In addition, many thousands of foreigners, including some 4,000 Americans, were trapped in Kuwait and Iraq and not allowed to leave. By the end of the first week of the crisis, it began to look like Iraqi aggression against Kuwait was a fait accompli, further aggression against Saudi Arabia a distinct possibility, and another Middle Eastern hostage crisis on the horizon as
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