The outcome of the Gulf war is the worst possible conclusion to the crisis. In effect, the Iraqi army went down without a fight. The military victory of imperialism was total, and achieved at negligible cost. Not since ancient times has there been a war in which the 'kill ratio' was 1000 to 1, as it was in the Gulf.
The United States bad been planning to fight a war in the Golf since the 1981 creation of the 'Rapid Deployment Force. Its original planners could hardly have dreamed of such a devastating outcome.
Now the war has been fought and won in the way it has, the door is opened for a carival of reaction in the Middle Bast. Indeed it will have negative effects on world politics as a whole. Socialists must analyse the and lost. Possibly they calculated that the US would back down before the start of The West's синаго sceano - Lat Iraq would withdraw to the Rumels oilfield and the islands, which would have made US intervention much more difficult - was not It is possible that Saddam miscalcumca оркака ко the war in the West. A very short war, with minimum Wester casualties, did not give the anti-war movement the chance to build giant mobilisations and break up the pro-war consensus. During the Vietnam war it took several years and hundreds of US casualties to build a big movement.
Most of all Saddam, like everyone else. miscalculated the kind of war that the US was preparing to fight. The devastating. sustained and unopposed use of airpower to smash up the infrastructure of the country and pulverise the army before a land war was totally underestimated. Iraq's air defences, despite the loss of more than 50 Western slanes, were useless agains this onslaught.
Whether Saddam's air. force defected or was put out of harm's way is beside the point. Had it fought it would have been totally destroyed. Partly this was because of the sheer number of 'allied' planes. But also because even the most modern Soviet MiG 29s Advertisment proved far inferior to the Stealth fighters and F-16s of the US airforce.
In the first couple of weeks of the war, the decision of the Iraqis to play down the number of civilian casualties was a big political mistake on their part. It made it more difficult to mobilise the anti-war moveThe foregoing points to two major reasons for the scale of the military defeat. First, Iraq could not match the sophistication of the Wester military equipment. The gap between US and Soviet military equipment has widened drastically since the Vietnam war. The Soviet Union has been outdistanced in its military technology, as in other spheres of industry.
Second, and this is much