n January 17, 1991, at 2:38 a.m., the night skies over Baghdad were scorched with tracer fire as the first bombs of Operation Desert Storm hit the capital of Iraq. It may have been early morning in Baghdad, but it was prime time in the West and the show had begun. 
It was the first war ever to begin live to camera, with one of the greatest beneficiaries being the cable network CNN. When the war ended six weeks later, television host David Letterman remarked, "Finally we can go back to ignoring CNN." Not so, it turned out &#150 Operation Desert Storm made CNN. 
Early thunder began the previous summer, on August 2, 1990, when Iraqi tanks rolled into oil-rich Kuwait in what turned out to be an almost effortless invasion. The next day, the United Nations Security Council demanded an immediate, unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. 
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was stunned by the vehement response. He had expected a casual reaction from the West to his occupation of Kuwait, based on what U.S. ambassador April Glaspie had told him a week earlier, when she said, "We have no opinions on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." 
Angry journalists confronted Glaspie, clutching copies of the transcript of her session with Saddam, accusing her of giving him carte blanche to take over Kuwait. At one of these sessions a rattled Glaspie replied, "I didn't think . . . the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait." 
Glaspie soon was removed from her post. 
he final statistics show the brief war killed more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers, wounded another 300,000, with 150,000 Iraqi soldiers deserting and 60,000 taken prisoner. The war claimed 148 American lives, another 458 were wounded, and 121 were killed in "non-hostile actions" &#150 victims of "friendly fire." Eleven American women died in combat. The cost of the war to the West has been estimated at between $63 billion and $72 billion US. 
Among the detritus of the sandy battlefield was 40 tonnes of radioactive depleted uranium from coalition weaponry. Iraqi forces also left behind seven million land mines in Kuwait, which have killed nearly 2,000 people since the war ended. Iraqi sabotage of Kuwaiti oil wells resulted in six to eight million barrels of oil spilling into the Persian Gulf, causing catastrophic damage to marine life. 
The U.S.-led forces arrayed against Saddam Hussein included soldiers from Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, and The United Arab Emirates. 
Coalition forces were said to number 540,000, pitted against &#150 first reports said &#150 432,000 battle-hardened Iraqi troops, many of whom were veterans of the eight-year war against Iran. Turns out there were only about 362,000 Iraqi troops, and by the time the ground campaign began in February the Iraqi troops had dwindled to only 183,000. 
The previous September, with war fever heating up, Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council issued the memorable statement &#150 usually attributed to Saddam Hussein &#150 "This battle is going to become the mother of all battles." 
The propaganda war soon took over, when a teenaged Kuwaiti woman known only as "Nayirah" told a U.S. Congressional committee that she watched Iraqi troops rip respirators from premature babies in a Kuwaiti hospital, leaving the infants to die. U.S. President George Bush often spoke of the villainy, talking of "babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor." 
No respirators were ripped from any babies in any incubators. It was a fabrication to create loathing against Iraq. Little "Nayirah" turned out to be Nayirah Sabah, the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S. Her visit to the congressional committee had been arranged by the U.S. advertising agency Hill & Knowlton. 
"It has been argued that the Gulf War was all about oil: Nobody would have gone to Kuwait's defence if it only produced carrots," London-based military affairs writer Gwynne Dyer said in an article in The Toronto Star in August, 2000. 
"Maybe so," Dyer continues. "But it was also one of only two wars that have been fought explicitly to enforce the key (United Nations) rule that no border changes achieved by force are valid and that the UN can authorize willing member states to put the borders back where they belong." 
t can be argued that another legacy of Operation Desert Storm is that it created the impetus for the current Middle East peace talks. 
As Dyer argues, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat believed Iraq would be allowed to keep Kuwait and that Saddam Hussein would share his new oil-money weaponry with the PLO. It backfired when Iraq lost and Kuwait expelled its large Palestinian community. Arafat then was forced by financial pressures to sign the Oslo accord, by which he agreed to negotiate a peace with Israel. 
Many of the sanctions imposed against Iraq as a result of the war still apply and are inflicting a heavy toll on ordinary Iraqis. Technically, food and medicine are not subject to the sanctions, but the shortages of both these items are drastic in Iraq in 2001. And the little things &#150 toys, lipstick, pencils, chocolate, school books, shoelaces, sanitary towels, even shroud cloth. Two dozen eggs exceeds a university professor's monthly salary. Some critics condemn the sanctions as a "silent holocaust," arguing Saddam Hussein is still capable of building new mansions, but those hit most brutally by the 10-year-old sanctions are the ordinary people.
After leaving his United Nations job as head of humanitarian relief in Iraq in 1999, Irish-born Dennis Halliday said, "We've got to classify sanctions as a form of warfare, given that they're producing 5,000 to 6,000 Iraqi deaths a month."