Desert Shield and Desert Storm, often called the Persian Gulf War, is now remembered at a new memorial on a corner of the National Mall in Washington, DC.
A bit of background first.
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To finance his war with Iran, Iraq President Saddam Hussein borrowed heavily from the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. In 1990, when those countries refused Iraq's request to cancel the debt, a force of 100,000 Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait and overran it in a matter of hours.
The invasion led to a UN Security Council embargo, sanctions on Iraq, and, finally, a US-led 42-nation coalition air and ground war. Iraq was defeated and retreated from Kuwait after a little more than six months.
Roughly 600,000 American troops were deployed; 375 died. Between 100 and 200 thousand Iraqis died.
The memorial’s centerpiece is the cascading bronze Unity Shield fountain. Its pattern draws on historic Middle Eastern shields, Kuwait basket weaving, and the Kuwaiti national flower, the Arfaj. The shield’s perimeter bears the names of all the coalition countries.
The memorial’s clockwise circulation pattern recalls the Army’s “left hook” battle strategy.
The Storm Wall Dune has bas-relief carvings of the three stages of the conflict: Build-up, Conflict, and Liberation. The sculptor is Emily Bedard of New York.
The birds in the Liberation section are an eagle and a falcon. Army veteran Robert J. Eccleston of Colorado sculpted them.
The low-rise walls match the shape and color of Kuwait's sand dunes, and the pavement evokes swirling desert sand.
A significant piece missing from the memorial is any acknowledgment of the many women who served in Desert Storm and Desert Shield. More than 40k women deployed on this mission, but all the figures depicted here are men.
Interestingly, more than half of the memorial's $42 million cost came from Kuwait. Other war memorials in the city received much more financial support from private donors, suggesting there was no groundswell of national support for remembering this war.
The results of the war were mixed: America showed strong post-Cold War leadership in bringing together 42 nations to stop aggression, and Iraq was expelled from Kuwait in just a few weeks of fighting. But in the end, the Gulf War did not produce the new world order that President George H.W. Bush had hoped for. Access to cheap oil was secured, and the US and other Western countries continued to turn a blind eye to the authoritarian governments, like Kuwait, in the region. And the US troops remaining in Saudi Arabia planted the seeds for the 9/11 attacks. And the response to that would bring American troops back to Iraq.
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