when operation desert storm was launched
in early 1991
i was in a hotel room overlooking the
las vegas strip
and as the television played out live
footage of the us-led invasion of the
gulf i looked out of the window at the
neon glow of the lights on the hotels
and the casinos and reminded myself just
how greedy the superpowers of the world
had become for crude oil
so it's no wonder that the us reacted
with such immediacy and intensity when
saddam hussein's iraq annexed their
small oil rich neighbor q weight in a
bid to gain control of the lucrative
wells in the desert
the response by coalition forces was
swift and hugely successful
it came as a cost to
many where i looked up and there's five
guys with guns pointed at my head
i said oh i'm not dead
no being dead it's a lot worse than
being a prisoner and those were the only
two choices at the time
they put me in a back room
last handcuffed and blindfolded with a
bag i met
and then i don't know the door slams
open
yeah my wall goes black
the gulf war was such a short conflict
that it seems to have faded from memory
but the political fallout still
resonates today
[Music]
in february 1991 kuwait city was freed
from the iraqi military
in just a few short months a gargantuan
coalition force spearheaded by the usa
had been assembled deployed and won the
gulf war in comprehensive fashion
saddam hussein's troops had been driven
back to baghdad
[Music]
the gulf war of 91 was the last time
that i can recall
that we really had a militarily
achievable and measurable objective
the goal was get all the iraqi forces
out of kuwait
it wasn't that we're going to go rebuild
the streets of kuwait city it wasn't
that we're going to instill democracy on
anybody it was we're going to push the
bad guys out of where they invaded
the gulf war was beamed across the world
and yet strangely it seems to have
disappeared from most people's memories
maybe that's because it was a relatively
straightforward success with few allied
casualties
or perhaps it was overshadowed by the
controversial iraq war in the same
region just over a decade later
but for the men and women who fought for
the liberation of kuwait
it will live long in the memory
[Music]
a lot of the families feel very
forgotten they they do feel it's
difficult more and they feel that the
sacrifice of their loved ones isn't
remembered very well
because to us
we got back after the war and life went
on as normal but for
a whole bunch of families
that just wasn't the case
you learn how to be a prisoner of war
you learn what it's like to be in
solitary confinement
and you have to learn to
live
pitch black half the time semi-pitch the
other time freezing cold
and you just have to manage your life
but you're a military person who is
attacking their country so they're not
nice to you
i do think the gulf war is a lesser
known war i think half a million of our
guys went
but
we really had a very low casualty rate
and we're very successful
and i think people like to talk about
stuff that isn't successful they somehow
think it'll sell better and maybe
they're right the seeds of the gulf war
were sown years before
rising out of the ashes of another
conflict that had raged in the region
[Music]
the iran iraq war lost most of the 1980s
and the us and the uk were on the side
of iraq because they were fighting iran
which had come to power in 1979 with the
revolution and was exporting islamic
fundamentalism so iraq was our party in
the conflict
[Music]
when it comes to an end it really
struggles to rebuild its infrastructure
because its economy is not doing so well
the part of the reason it's not doing so
well is that the price of oil globally
is quite low and
iraq blames kuwait and the uae for
flooding the market with cheap oil for
keeping the oil price down
iraq's president saddam hussein
had taken control of the ruling bath
party in 1979
he'd suppressed his enemies and executed
his rivals on the way to the top
and now he had kuwait firmly in his
sights
iraq sees kuwait as part of its
territory it regards the line in the
sand almost literally drawn by the
british in 1922 was not a real border
and that it was entitled not least
because the border meant that iraq had
virtually no sea access no coastline
felt the kuwait was part of iraqi
territory moreover felt the kuwait had
been suppressing the price of oil and
that it owed iraq historically
saddam hussein also accuses kuwait of
stealing some of iraq's oil so one of
the oil fields is on the border between
kuwait and iraq and saddam hussein
accuses kuwait of what we call side
drilling or slant drilling into iraqi
fields and taking their oil and this
causes the sort of melting pot in the
summer of 1990.
saddam hussein began to deploy iraqi
troops to the border of kuwait
over a hundred thousand soldiers were in
position to strike at any moment
with an invasion imminent arab league
delegates met in jeddah in saudi arabia
to try and find a peaceful resolution
the first wave of the jedi talks just
didn't really work very well saddam
agreed that they would meet again in a
few days time to resume the talks
however
it was a bluff
he deceived everyone because they
genuinely believed he was committed to
completing these talks and the very next
day he entered kuwait
i went out to rf germany in january of
1990 to larbruck
and everything was still very cold war
russia was the threat soviet union
warsaw pact
and then saddam hussein invaded kuwait
and
everyone was looking at each other
wondering where's kuwait
the united nations condemned the
invasion and demanded that iraq leave
kuwait immediately mr saddam is saying
you simply do what the world is calling
upon you to do get out
within a week the americans had started
building a response of their own
the world was on the brink of war
on the 2nd of august 1990 iraq invaded
kuwait
and in less than a week saddam hussein
had taken control of the small country
and declared it iraq's 19th and newest
province
the invasion happens very swiftly it's
not a very great piece of territory
kuwait they cover the land from the
iraqi border to the sea very quickly
there's overwhelming force kuwaiti
forces try to resist but they're nothing
like as numerous or as well equipped or
as experienced and the iraqis take the
country
initially when saddam hussein moved his
troops into kuwait and the ruling family
were forced to flee to saudi arabia he
set up a puppet government which would
control the area in the short term but
very quickly he annexed the territory
and what we mean by that is he
essentially subsumed kuwait into iraqi
territory the un condemned the attack
and called on saddam hussein to
immediately withdraw his troops from
kuwait
in a new look global political landscape
where communism had all but been
defeated
president george bush's usa was looking
to lead the way
in the 1990s we've seen the end of the
cold war
now that we are no longer in this big
bipolar competition between the soviet
union and the united states what does
the world look like what do the
international relations mean and for
george h.w bush he develops this idea of
a new world order and it's this concept
of global justice actually going through
appreciating the united nations working
together
upholding human rights and the
international rule of law
i think his idea was
that we would have a new world order
where the un would be powerful
and it would be based on international
law and it would mean repelling
any territorial aggression
and the u.s would guarantee this world
order by being the only
superpower
the u.s began operation desert shield
which meant deploying their army navy
and air force to the persian gulf this
was their way of protecting saudi arabia
from iraq's military might which had now
swelled inside kuwait to around about
300 000 troops
desert shield was really just the
buildup of all of the
coalition forces to get ready to invade
there was some question as to whether
they were going to roll on through
kuwait into saudi and then just
accumulating enough stuff and enough
willpower probably to push him back out
of kuwait
first of all it was august and saudi
arabia the biggest danger was probably
not getting shot it was heat stroke and
trying to rebuild
equipment that had to be taken apart
when you moved it in 128 degrees you get
there and now you've got your
helicopters built and now you're just
waiting for everyone else
a coalition was formed to pressure
saddam hussein to withdraw from kuwait
38 nations joined the us to form the
largest alliance since the second world
war
the iraqi army in 1990 is the fourth
largest in the world and iraq has been
fighting for much of the last 10 years
so it has battle-hardened troops it has
very good equipment paid for or provided
by the soviet union
and the west decides to have what
general peter de billiere the british
commander says is a sledgehammer to
crack a nut and this coalition was
really remarkable in lots of ways not
only was it such a big coalition with so
many nations and all the arab nations
agreeing to take part we also saw
germany taking part in what they were
allowed to do within their limitations
sweden returning since the early 1800s
to active service and even the
argentinian flotilla arriving to support
the british naval ship so this was
really quite an unusual situation and i
think for many people represented what
they hoped the new world order would
look like with all these nations working
together
to
fight against an aggressor who was going
against the rule of law
[Music]
we deployed to book in northwestern
saudi arabia in december 1990
everything seems strange initially
you're in the middle of the desert
suddenly
it's it looks different it smells
different
all the while not knowing
was this going to come to a war at all
might happen tomorrow next week
next month
so you're trying to cram as much
training in as you can in a short period
of time just so that everyone's ready
in anticipation of reporting on a
potential war members of the media also
began to arrive in the region it was new
territory for journalist mark urban
the situation with saudi arabia was that
it was a country that very few of us had
any real knowledge of
including people who'd been involved in
coverage of the middle east before and
we went back out there in january and we
went back out in the near certainty that
there was going to be a conflict we
didn't think that saddam was suddenly
going to withdraw on the eve of the
ultimatum so we went back knowing we
were going to cover a
conflict president bush issued iraq with
a 15th of january deadline for a total
withdrawal from kuwait
throughout the autumn and winter of 1990
the western forces are amassing on the
saudi border on several occasions saddam
says he will withdraw if this is granted
or access to this oil field is made
available the west make it clear there
are no negotiations it must be a
complete withdrawal
iraq was showing no signs of withdrawing
from kuwait so it was looking
increasingly likely that we'd be going
to war but it was the day before
that the boss called us in and said
right it's going to happen it's early
tomorrow morning so we'll be flying
tonight
so get a bit of rest we'll come in this
afternoon we'll finish off the planning
and we go tonight
and that was quite a shock
war broke out on the 17th of january
1991 with operation desert storm
coalition air forces took to the skies
from aircraft carriers like this one
based in the persian gulf
and lay siege to iraq
a voice reported to be saddam hussein's
announced on iraqi radio
the mother of all battles
has begun
the basic principle of the gulf war as
far as the western alliance is concerned
is to as far as possible eliminate
allied flatten the iraqi defenses before
an invasion takes place on land and so
for that reason air assault is crucially
important
air superiority has been the most
important thing since the second world
war
and in iraq it is felt that the u.s air
force and the royal air force between
them can do much of the heavy lifting
raf pilot john peters alongside his
navigator john nicol flew their first
mission on day one of the war
the plan was we were going to attack a
an airfield to the southeast of baghdad
the main operating base
we arrived in at midnight and we're told
we're going at six in the morning
it was a high low high sorter which
means you're going at high level to get
range drop down below the radar horizons
get to low level to attack the airfield
and then come out low level and back
high to get home
that first week the sorties were all at
low level at night that was largely to
evade the iraqi defenses but we were
taking quite a few losses so we were
losing i think roughly an aircraft a day
from the tornado force on those
low-level sorties
and we lost a crew from our own squadron
and you don't know what's happened to
them you know they didn't come back from
sortie
you don't know if they're alive or not
sadly they were killed in the crash
but you've just got to get on with it
on the way in we got shot at by guns and
missiles and anti-aircraft bullets
just everywhere missiles and bullets and
everything everyone's shooting at us
came off at target and we're heading
home here about 50 feet above the ground
doing 600 knots on the way back and then
suddenly
you get this huge cup bang and the whole
aircraft is shunted across the desert
floor
the aircraft rotated a couple of times
so i'm seeing sand and sky and pushing
this stick and say i can't hold it
prepare to eject john nichols said don't
you bloody well eject
but the damage to their tornado was too
much to recover from
basey and missile gone right up our
right hand engine and exploded
we flew for two three minutes trying to
solve the problem and then john started
screaming we're on fire on fire and
basically we were in a ball of flame you
couldn't see any of the aircraft it was
orange
it was like flying the nose of an
aircraft outside this comet of flame i
mean it was just a ball of orange flame
so that's when we decided to eject
what made the gulf war different from
previous conflicts was the news
reporting from the front line we weren't
just passive observers anymore now with
24-hour news channels we could see
things happening in real time sometimes
we'd see events unfold from thousands of
miles away even before a lot of the
troops on the ground did
for me
when the air war started we deployed out
to the middle of the desert and quite
frankly we didn't have any news
and there wasn't radio and there wasn't
tv and there wasn't the internet and so
the only news we got was the little
evening briefing from the commander and
he would tell you if somebody got shot
down but we were really pretty close to
unaware of what was happening
there are some really odd stories of
people being on the phone to families
back home and being told that the news
says the iraqis have launched god
missiles against your base so
while you're talking to me you need to
be running for a shelter and then the
air raid siren's going off on the base
so they've known about leicester somehow
[Music]
we did a very kind of audacious
unilateral one day where we went right
up onto the border with kuwait the
border is marked by a sand bank of berm
and we used that berm as a sort of
covered position
to film into kuwait and as we were there
some u.s marine aircraft appeared on the
scene and actually started an airstrike
just several hundred meters in front of
us and so we filmed american marine
harriers cluster bombing these iraqi
units
from pretty close up you could hear the
crackle of the cluster bombs and the
thump of the other bombs they were
dropping we were very near to it so what
we were trying to do was cover and
convey the reality of what was an air
war
during the air strikes of operation
desert storm over 88 and a half thousand
tons of bombs were dropped by coalition
forces
new technology meant that on-board
cameras and night vision footage
captured the annihilation of iraqi
targets for all to see
it was very very showy
the use of very sophisticated weapons
very sophisticated aircraft all of the
stuff was it was almost like an air show
because actually it was all designed for
a war with the soviet union and instead
of the soviet union you had
saddam hussein
for critics of the war it suggested a
kind of detachment from the horror of
what took place
something we see now with the use of
drones that the horrors can be
perpetrated without real awareness of
the human cost
and the critics of the war certainly it
could appear to be almost an
entertainment
for viewers watching this at home rather
than a war in which people weren't
losing their lives
the coalition forces obliterated the
iraqi defenses from above
but not without suffering casualties of
their own
some personnel were shot down
captured and tortured behind enemy lines
[Music]
the gulf war is often noted as being
incredibly one-sided
292 coalition troops lost their lives
compared with tens of thousands of
iraqis
however some coalition members had an
extremely traumatic experience
raf pilot john peters and navigator john
nichol had been shot down with no idea
what would happen next
we're in the desert for about two hours
i mean it was fascicle because we had
bright orange dinghies bright orange
life jackets
burning tornadoes so we stood up like a
sore thumb
we had a plan uh tried to follow it but
two to three hours later about 20 iraqi
soldiers found us
20 guys with klashnikov machine guns
i just taken out because i wore contact
lenses and i thought i don't want my
contact lens in because i
thought we're going to get captured or
killed
so i flicked out my contact lens and put
my glasses on and the contact lens were
then the very first bullet hit
and
blew away the contact lens and then
there were hundreds of bullets and
barriers in the standby machine gun
phone
the two men were picked up and held as
prisoners of war
the news of their capture was broadcast
on iraqi tv much to the concern of their
colleagues in the raf
the first crews that were lost
and that then came up on television as
pows john peters and john nichol they
were from the same bases as from us from
a sister squadron so we knew those guys
we'd been drinking with them in the bar
at la brook
we trained with them
we we knew them well
and
there they are as pows haven't obviously
been badly treated
was i prepared to go to war in terms of
how to operate a tornado and the flying
side
absolutely
are you prepared for
being a prisoner of war
well what can prepare you for that you
can be told about it you can be told
look if they break your fingers it's
gonna hurt
very different when
you are presented with a gun against
your head and they pull the trigger or
they smash you around the head with a
baseball bat or they threaten you with
rape
you can't really prepare for those
moments until they happen to
john was interrogated and tortured for
the duration of the war
he'd been shot down on day one
while u.s army flight surgeon rhonda
cornum and her crewmates on a blackhawk
helicopter were downed by an
anti-aircraft gun just a day before the
war ended
getting shut down is certainly a bad
thing and as we were flying and you
could hear small arms hitting the
aircraft already and then you felt the
big shutter and you felt the big lurch
and you knew we were going in
and my last conscious thought was i am
going to die right here i'd done lots of
accident investigations in my life i
knew how fast we were going this was
going to be an unsurvivable way
and i thought well at least i'm dying
doing something honorable
ronda blacked out and awoke in the
wreckage hours later
four of her crewmates had died but she'd
somehow managed to survive
albeit with two broken arms and a
gunshot wound to her back
well they took me to some bunker and i
was asked you know who was i and what
was i doing there and i
well
my name was on my shirts as i made you
ronda cornum and so i said i'm major
ronda cornum and what am i doing there i
i had a helicopter wreck
that's all i said and they threw me in
the middle of a group of iraqi soldiers
i was kneeling down left i didn't just
do a face plant since i couldn't catch
myself and then they pulled out a
revolver and held at the back of my head
and i really thought um this is it and i
really thought you know if they were
going to shoot me they could have done
it at the site they didn't need to do
all this other stuff
i had a little chance to reflect and i
had a great life and um my daughter was
going to do fine but this time she was
almost 13 and she was gonna be fine and
i thought well you know everybody's
gonna die sometime and it's not gonna
hurt they're gonna shoot me right in the
brainstem and it'll be instantaneous
and then the gun went click
[Music]
and it didn't fire
[Music]
and then the next event is you're in a
little room
you can smell
sweat
and smoke
you can feel the lights on you you can
smell threat actually
and there's about seven eight men there
you're blindfolded and handcuffed with a
bag in your head
they ask a question
i didn't even get i cannot because i was
going to say i cannot answer that
question
and your head explodes a baseball bat is
around your head
and
they don't ask a question
for an hour
five six seven men
beat you with baseball bats
your body is like a ragdoll
and that's the beginning of uh
five days of the shittiest time of my
life
[Music]
just hours after her capture ronda and
her surviving crewmate sergeant troy
dunlap were moved to a jail in basra so
we started down this road
and it was all blacked out just like we
would do
and then
they pulled the thing over and all the
iraqis got out
and they went and laid in the ditch
and he looks at me and he says should we
try to run and i said sergeant the lamp
you were a tied up guy with a
american uniform on with a broken armed
female pilot no i don't think we should
try to run i think we'll get shot
and then an aircraft
was strafing and i thought to myself i
cannot believe i survived this horrible
wreck and i would get killed by any ten
of my own guys
but luckily either they knew that was
our car and missed it or they were just
bad shots that day but they didn't hit
us and they flew away and the iraqis got
back in and we continued on our way to
jail
you're in a survivalistic animalistic
environment where it's just pure
instinct you want to stay alive
you can't make yourself die you know you
make every effort to keep yourself alive
but they're in the interrogation rooms
you don't actually have the choice
because they decide whether you live or
die so you just hold on to yourself
whatever that means you just hold on
you just want to breathe it's like being
in a swimming pool underwater and you
run out of breath
and your ribs don't expand you've got
the pain holding the pain and just
before you get to the surface someone
else jumps in and shoves your head
underwater
[Music]
you are just fighting to get to surface
all you want to do is take a breath and
that's what it's like being in the
little room
while john spent seven weeks in hell
his compatriots made wave after wave of
airstrikes destroying and depleting the
iraqi forces
they now commanded the skies and were
ready to put an end to the war
on february the 24th the coalition's
ground campaign began
it was time to clear the iraqi troops
out of kuwait once and for all
the aerial bombardment had done a
significant job
the actual forces were losing morale we
saw a lot of iraqis withdrawing
or putting their hands up and
surrendering
[Music]
and although there were a few that sort
of stayed to fight and continue to fight
actually the ground campaign
received much less resistance than it
anticipated
and although every life lost is
important it received a lot less
casualties than they had anticipated
these guys had absolutely no fight left
in them at all they didn't resist in any
meaningful way
it's easy to forget that it was very
cold people think of saudi arabia as
being a place of you know camels and
oases which which it is
but that february and early march it was
very cold
and a lot of these iraqi guys in
addition to having been bombed and
everything else they were just miserable
they'd been badly supplied they were
freezing cold
and they just wanted to give up
[Music]
just 100 hours after coalition troops
entered kuwait the country was liberated
as people celebrated in the streets
president bush announced a ceasefire
iraq had been defeated
us it was just another night sortie we
were targeting aircraft hangars at our
takadam airfield to the west of baghdad
that night
the bombs hit the target
and
we flew back to tabuk and before we went
to bed somebody put bbc world service
news on
and the ceasefire had been announced
i can report to the nation aggression is
defeated the war is over
[Applause]
the boss then put a few calls into the
headquarters in riyadh to make sure that
was actually the case
and they said yeah there'll be no flying
tomorrow that's it it's finished
i don't think we really thought about it
at the time that we just dropped the
last raf bomb of the gulf war
[Music]
the media arrived in the newly freed
capital to scenes of jubilation and
chaos
kuwait city in the hours after
liberation was a very
strange
almost post-apocalyptic
kind of atmosphere it was like a huge
metropolis that had been ransacked and
then sort of switched off at the mains
like it had died or
or been disconnected from everything
that normally allows a city to run there
were literally dead iraqis hanging out
of the cabs of these vehicles
then we were greeted by kuwaitis
including women hugging and kissing us
despite the fact that they were wearing
nikabs and they were from a conservative
muslim society
their joy was such that they literally
greeted us as liberators
[Applause]
one of the most enduring images of the
gulf war was these burning oil fires lit
by retreating iraqi troops across kuwait
one last ditch attempt at some kind of
small victory designed to destroy their
enemy's most valuable assets
they burned for over nine months
and caused widespread pollution
[Music]
according to the kuwait oil company
there are almost 600 wells of light
within a few hundred yards there's a
searing heat
the coalition forces who were being held
in iraq were oblivious to the fact that
the war had come to an end
one day the bombing stopped
and we were bombed every day you know 18
hours days to the ground you're very
used to the ground vibrating and in
solitary confinement when it's you know
dark
sound is everything
eerily quiet so it's really difficult to
describe yeah they suddenly go gosh no
bombs go and you can't help but think
hang around it's so unusual something's
happened and the following morning there
was a knock on the door and this door
normally flew open and they came beat
the [ __ ] out of here
the door opened and a guy in a suit who
was in the seat he did this he did the
button up
and he went good morning for laptop
peters
i would just like to tell you the war is
over and then he did this under the
button he went if there's anything my
staff can do for you please ask
and that was how that was the beginning
of our release
[Music]
being freed is a great thing
i didn't really believe it i suppose
until we got back to saudi arabia and we
were put on the hospital ship the mercy
so we spent a few days there
getting debriefed and getting medical
exams and then they flew us from bahrain
back to washington where you know the
biggest celebration and the secretary of
defense is talking
and the best thing that happened was
they brought all the family members of
us all up to that same celebration so
that was a big reunion
so kuwait was free and the coalition
forces could begin to go home
but the problems in iraq were far from
over
as long as saddam hussein was in charge
the future of the country was in turmoil
[Music]
on the 28th of february 1991 president
george bush had declared a ceasefire the
gulf war was over
but images from the days leading up to
the cessation of combat revealed a
horrific scene of carnage
iraqi forces retreating from kuwait just
hours before the end of the war had been
attacked by coalition forces leaving a
trail of death and destruction
the day after we got to kuwait city
we heard tell about the sort of road to
hell as people were calling it and and
we'd seen evidence that um the iraqis
had been attacked as they were leaving
road began to fill up with burning
vehicles and things like that people
tried to go around it
they then either got stuck in the sand
or they then got hit
and what you ended up with was a sort of
terrible burning traffic jam of hundreds
of vehicles
and one of the things i found very
affecting in fact it moved me to tears
was that the
the people who are registering the the
iraqis for burial
could only find um
the dog tags the things that you mark
bodies with on on a very small number of
them
and in the group that we filmed of 80
guys who were going to be buried only
two of them had their identity tags on
and i remember writing a line of script
about 78 unknown soldiers whose families
will never know their fate
but the tragedy of that really struck me
very deeply at the time
that there would be these guys who'd
gone off to war from you know
some village in the marshes or suburb of
baghdad
and that their families would never
really know how and where they died that
they'd just never come back
and i found that very upsetting
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the war was over but saddam hussein
remained in power
un law restricted the coalition forces
from continuing any further
the biggest question with the invasion
is whether to stop at the iraqi border
whether to go on and remove the regime
which had created this war
much of the western response had been to
describe hussein as another hitler and
as with 1945 there was nothing short of
removing him physically from power
that wasn't done
the reasons being that united nations
resolutions had not given sanction for
that so it would have been illegal
there's always been discussions about
whether
the ground forces should have gone to
baghdad and captured saddam hussein it
was never the aim the aim was only ever
to liberate kuwait the fact that saddam
hussein stayed in power is unfortunate
because of what he subsequently did to
iraq
instead the u.s president called for
revolution in iraq asking saddam's
enemies the shias in the south and the
kurds in the north to try and topple the
tyrant
bush called on iraqis to rise up which
they did
but nothing was done to support those
people
and the consequence was that many many
shias suffered terrible repression and
curds
following the uprisings many kurdish
people in northern iraq were forced to
flee from their homes
in 1991 an operation was set up to
protect the refugees and give them
humanitarian aid
royal marine major general andy salmon
was part of the coalition effort named
operation haven in the uk
to put an end to the persecution in
which iraqi troops loyal to saddam
hussein had been killing over a thousand
kurdish people every day
we came across a bath party police
station which had you know blood-stained
walls down in the cellars with iron bed
frames sort of wired up to light sockets
in the ceiling for electric torture and
the stench was pretty horrible
so we sort of saw things like that
there were two major things that had to
be done one was a humanitarian job in
the mountains a massive airlift in 38
days there was a bigger airlift to
provide food and relief to at least a
million and a half people than in the
whole of the berlin area if that gives
you an idea of the scale so that was the
first task really which was to save life
and the second task then was to mount
the security operation and physically
clear
iraqi forces
out of a portion of northern iraq
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negotiating with the enemy was a
dangerous but necessary tactic
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we drove into
this
hilltop sort of fort type position
and immediately was surrounded by about
100 iraqi soldiers
and they were probably a surprise to see
us as we were surprised to see them
there was no sort of turning back
and so we introduced ourselves as
representative 4-5 commander in the
coalition
and said well
in a couple of days time four or five
commander gonna come in and clear the
whole of this region
and it'd be a fantastic idea if you
weren't here when the commando comes
through
you said no that's absolutely impossible
and i said well listen we're coming
through and it'd be better to avoid any
fighting and any violence so it'd be
crack an idea if you go on why don't you
try again anyway said no it's impossible
we can't move you know i haven't got the
orders of permissions to do that anyway
the next day they disappeared
the humanitarian operation was an
overwhelming success which helped bring
peace and comfort to the kurds
haven i think it was
about 58 days or you know just short of
a couple of months solid
one and a half million kurds were saved
moved into refugee camps and were able
to go back to their homes
that operation was sustained
really by the creation of this sort of
no-fly zone to make sure that saddam's
forces didn't go back in there
after the war and the uprisings against
him saddam hussein remained in power in
iraq while in the 1992 u.s presidential
election his old adversary george bush
lost out
many people look at it from a political
perspective and say
actually after the gulf war president
george bush could not hold on to the
presidency but saddam hussein stayed in
power and so the question has asked who
really won overall
it took another 12 years for the u.s to
get what it really wanted this infamous
scene
took place in the wake of the iraq war
of 2003
when coalition forces returned to the
gulf and under more controversial
circumstances
under the banner of the war on terror
a new president george bush achieved
what his father never did
toppling saddam hussein
and extinguishing the ghosts
of the first gulf war
it sparked a determination among
so-called neoconservatives that they
were going to defeat saddam hussein and
so it directly led to the invasion of
iraq in 2003
i think that was the important
thing that it started
it involved sanctions against iraq that
continued and that created huge problems
inside iraq so that by the time they did
invade 2003
iraq was really almost already a very
weak state in a fragile state so they
were able to topple saddam hussein very
easily in 2003
but they were left actually essentially
with a new war
saddam hussein was executed for his
crimes against humanity in 2006
and it took another five years before
u.s troops finally withdrew from iraq
overtaken in the conscience by the iraq
war the gulf war of 1991 has been almost
entirely forgotten about despite its
devastating success
if anyone goes to london they'll see war
memorials everywhere
bomber command battle of britain
commandos korean war there still isn't a
memorial in london to the gulf war there
is one in the national arboretum which
was unveiled in 2016 paid for by the
kuwaiti government which marks those who
fell but nothing in london so far and i
think that does reflect the fact that it
isn't something because of the
low numbers of casualties that it's not
something which is as
i significant we could do with it being
in the public consciousness more because
those guys gave everything for the cause
and didn't really get the recognition
that they need
the gulf war was a resounding military
success for the u.s led coalition but it
came about at an enormous political cost
the russian leader mikhail gorbachev
said the end of the war would herald an
age of peace
well it didn't did it thirty years later
the area is still in chaos if the
americans thought they were bringing
stability to the region
they couldn't have been more wrong
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you