Before dawn on February 24, the 1st and 2nd US marine divisions spearheaded the secondary ground attack straight through the middle of the Iraqi forward defenses in southwestern Kuwait, driving relentlessly in the direction of several key oil fields, and Kuwait City itself. The Marines advanced so swiftly through the Iraqi Army’s shattered defenses that they encountered only scattered counterattacks, and reached the outskirts of Kuwait City after only two days of fighting. Arab forces were given the honor of liberating the city the next day.
Meanwhile, the main ground attack, a massive “left hook” enveloping maneuver launched from 150 miles west of the Kuwait border in the Saudi Arabian desert by the US 7th Corps, consisted of 150,000 troops and five heavily armored US and British divisions. With its flanks secured by other forces, this juggernaut rumbled through the Iraqi desert in the direction of the Rumaila oil fields and Basra, turned sharply to the northeast, and punched hard into the vulnerable right flank of the Iraqi defenses in Kuwait. The coalition forces eviscerated at least ten Iraqi divisions in a mere four days of fighting.
Baghdad announced a complete withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait on February 26, but coalition forces continued to press the attack until the morning of February 28, when President Bush ordered a cease-fire after only 100 hours of ground combat. The casualty figures reflected the lopsided nature of the fighting: between 25,000 and 65,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 75,000 wounded. American losses were 148 killed in action and 467 wounded, while the rest of the coalition suffered 292 killed and 776 wounded.
A cease fire was negotiated on March 3, in which Iraq promised to abide by all UN resolutions.
In the wake of the coalition’s decisive victory, the Bush administration, the media, and defense analysts made expansive claims for the war’s significance. A wave of patriotism and euphoria swept across the country, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the victories over the Germans and Japanese 45 years earlier.
The victory had indeed finally exorcised the ghosts of Vietnam; a completely recalibrated U.S. military, practicing a new high-tech way of war, had vanquished a brutal dictator and upheld a fundamental principle of international law: thou shalt not invade a sovereign nation’s territory. In the first great post-cold war crisis, the US military emerged with enormous prestige.
That war machine, with its unprecedented capabilities, would be a vital deterrent to future mischief-making. It would serve as the world community’s primary asset in preserving peace and stability in what George H. W. Bush and others referred to as the “New World Order.”
Future history would prove this wide-eye optimism to be premature. The old ways, the great games, the great power competition that many thought fell right beside the Berlin wall, would continue as before - though not always with the same players, and rarely with the same stakes. The triumphant technologies and tactics of Desert Storm would be intensely studied, and suitable countermeasures developed to counterbalance them. The global players evaluated the new realities and adjusted their long-term playbooks accordingly. Regional strategic balances long-established and shattered by the war opened the door to new actors and dormant forces alike to assert themselves. Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and subsequent long-drawn COIN campaigns, Daesh, even the resurgence of Russia and China on the global stage can all trace their origins back to Desert Storm and its aftermath.
But for a little while, expediency and realpolitik walked hand in hand with moral imperative. And it was good.