AL-JAHRA, Kuwait: On the outskirts of Kuwait City, the love Kuwaitis
have for former US President George H.W. Bush could be seen in 2016 on a
billboard one Bedouin family put up to announce their son’s wedding.
That son being Bush Al-Widhan, born in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf
War that saw US-led forces expel the occupying Iraqi troops of dictator
Saddam Hussein.
“He was a real man, a lion,” said Mubarak Al-Widhan, the father of the
Kuwaiti Bush, of the American president. “He stood for our right for
freedom, and he gave us back our country.”
With Bush’s death , his legacy across the Middle East takes root in that
100-hour ground war that routed Iraqi forces. That war gave birth to
the network of military bases America now operates across the Arabian
Gulf supporting troops in Afghanistan and forces fighting against Daesh
in Iraq and Syria.
However, Bush ultimately would leave the Shiite and Kurdish insurgents
he urged to rise up against Saddam in 1991 to face the dictator’s wrath
alone, leading to thousands of deaths. That mixed picture only extends
to the presidency of his son, George W. Bush, who ordered the 2003
US-led invasion of Iraq that overthrew Saddam, whom he once famously
described as “the guy who tried to kill my dad one time.”
“I feel tension in the stomach and in the neck ... but I also feel a
certain calmness when we talk about these matters,” the elder Bush once
said about the 1991 Gulf War, according to biographer Jon Meacham. “I
know I am doing the right thing.”
Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, angry that the tiny neighbor and
the United Arab Emirates had ignored OPEC quotas, which Saddam claimed
cost his nation $14 billion. Saddam also accused Kuwait of stealing $2.4
billion by pumping crude from a disputed oil field and demanded that
Kuwait write off an estimated $15 billion of debt that Iraq had
accumulated during its 1980s war with Iran.
A World War II fighter pilot shot down fighting against the Japanese,
Bush came to view Saddam as similar to Adolf Hitler, a madman who seized
neighboring Kuwait and could plunge the world into conflict if he
continued into Saudi Arabia. With Vietnam still a potent memory, Bush
rallied together a coalition of nations to back the US as it deployed
troops to the region and began bombing runs. He talked Israel out of
retaliating for Iraqi Scud missiles attacks for fear of alienating Arab
allies.
“This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait,” Bush famously warned.
And it didn’t.
On Feb. 24, 1991, US troops and their allies stormed into Kuwait. It
ended 100 hours later. America suffered only 148 combat deaths during
the whole campaign, while over 20,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed.
In the aftermath of the campaign, some called for Bush to continue into
Iraq and topple Saddam. Bush in speeches encouraged Iraqis to rise up
against the dictator, while privately hoping someone within his own
military would depose him.
“To occupy Iraq would shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab
world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero,”
Bush later said. “It would have taken us way beyond the imprimatur of
international law, ... assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a
securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would
be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war.”
That hesitation allowed Saddam to regain the upper hand against
insurgents and caused a refugee crisis in Iraq’s northern Kurdish
region. The dictator tauntingly installed a tile mosaic of a scowling
likeness of the president at the door of Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Hotel,
which forced entering foreign dignitaries to often step on his face just
above its “Bush is criminal” caption.
Even Iran, which hated Saddam for starting their 1980s war, remained
suspicious of Bush despite his pledge of “good will begets good will.”
Iran leaned on Lebanon’s Shiite militants to help win the release
American hostages like Terry Anderson of The Associated Press, but
relations went no further. One of Bush’s last acts as president,
pardoning former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others for
their role in the Iran-Contra scandal, an offshoot of that hostage
crisis.
Still, Bush’s decisions in the 1991 war and its aftermath echo even now.
The Kurdish crisis gave birth to the US-imposed no-fly zone in northern
Iraq that allowed the Kurds to flourish into the semi-autonomous region
now demanding independence. Defense agreements with Gulf nations grew
into a series of major military installations across the region.
His son would launch the 2003 invasion of Iraq after 9/11 and become so
hated in the Arab world an Iraq journalist would even throw a shoe at
him during a news conference. But the elder Bush remained beloved,
perhaps nowhere more than Kuwait, where Americans even today can get
hugged while walking down the street. A group of Kuwaiti officials
including the country’s National Assembly speaker met with the former
president in October 2017 to wish him well.
The former president’s Kuwaiti namesake Bush Al-Widhan ended up working
in the country’s National Guard. His name fascinated others.
“I went with my father to Cleveland, Ohio ... and the passport control
clerk asked me about the name,” Al-Widhan recounted. “I couldn’t tell
him the story. My English is bad. I said: ‘George Bush, George Bush.
Kuwait war.’ Everyone thought it was a great name.”
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