Why Did the US Army stop short of Baghdad in Operation Desert Storm and leave Iraqi Shi'ites and Kurds more or less alone to face the wrath of Saddam Hussein?
             Why did a coalition of over 30 nations find it was necessary to go to war to help Kuwait after it was invaded by Iraq? How did the Coalition defeat the Iraqis'? And why did they leave thousands of Kurds and Iraqi Shi'ites to face Saddam Hussein? The Gulf War was sparked by Saddam's violent tendencies, the dispute over borders, and finally most importantly oil. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 the world had seen enough, the NATO nations formed a coalition with other countries and declared war on Iraq. One key piece of this collation was Iraqi Shi'ites and Kurds who had been fighting Saddam's oppressive reign for years, however when the war ended they were left to face Saddam alone without the promised US help. Together these groups fought in the Middle East until 1991 trying to liberate the nation of Kuwait and rid the region of Saddam's terror.
             Since the invasion of Kuwait caught the world by surprise, the question in everybody's mind was – What were the reasons for the invasion? The first reason was Saddam Hussein, Saddam had two distinct characteristics: one, the determination to be remembered in history, two, a certain vision of the future, Saddam wanted to have a unified Arab world with Baghdad as its center. Hussein also felt that after the fall of the Ottoman Empire there was an uneven distribution of wealth from oil reserves to the allied nations (Bin, Hill, Jones 1998). Iraq's only hope of survival was clearly oil revenues from its neighbor, Kuwait. Iraq's economy was also hurt with the consequences of the 8-year Iran-Iraq War, a war in which the Americans provided weapons and training for Iraqi troops (Grossman 1995). When Iraq's leaders claimed victory there were three-quarters of a million ...