1990 Saddam invades Saudi Arabia

[CharlesMartell]

Pretty much as the title says.
In OTL he invaded Kuwait and then sat there,
thinking that the rest of the world would accept it as
a fait accompli.

But what if he believed that the world WOULD react.

In that case would it not make more strategic sense
to invade Saudi Arabia also and try to create as
much "strategic depth" as possible?

From Kuwait City to Riyadh is only about 500 km as the crow flies.

If he were quick enough, well prepared enough and lucky
enough, who knows, perhaps he could have captured
Meccah and/or Medina as well.

What would the reaction of the Arab world have been?
What would the reaction of the rest of the world have been?
Could the Saudis have stopped Saddam on there own in 1990?
Would the west have had enough time to put military assets
in place to stop the invasion?

 

[Brasidas]

Pretty much as the title says.
In OTL he invaded Kuwait and then sat there,
thinking that the rest of the world would accept it as
a fait accompli.

But what if he believed that the world WOULD re-act.

In that case would it not make more strategic sense
to invade Saudi Arabia also and try to create as
much "strategic depth" as possible?

From Kuwait City to Riyadh is only about 500 km as the crow flies.

If he were quick enough, well prepared enough and lucky
enough, who knows, perhaps he could have captured
Meccah and/or Medina as well.

What would the reaction of the Arab world have been?
What would the reaction of the rest of the world have been?
Could the Saudis have stopped Saddam on there own in 1990?
Would the west have had enough time to put military assets
in place to stop the invasion?

Iraq had some historic claim to Kuwait. To just attack the Saudis wouldn't exactly help his case. There'd be a stronger response by his neighbours and abroad.

Strategic depth? You mean thinner forces spread across a larger area more vulnerable to encirclement?

Its a long drive to Mecca. If they get that far, see above. There'd be no need for street fighting in Mecca.

NATO receives more basing rights than OTL, tosses in some bloody amphibious invasions, cuts off and rolls up the Iraqi military more effectively, and drives to Baghdad.

 

[BolivarianHero]

Saudi women and Christians would certainly be better off if saddam had deposed the Wahabi terrorist regime.

 

[mikegold]

Saudi women and Christians would certainly be better off if saddam had deposed the Wahabi terrorist regime.

Ha! True. Just an example of how in the late 20th Century Middle East, if it wasn't one bad choice, it was another.

 

[NHBL]

Double regime change?

Hopefully the Wahibi regime would be removed from power completely, and not have a chance of geting it back afterwards. (Although I think the chances for moderation over there would be minimal...)

 

[Brasidas]

Hopefully the Wahibi regime would be removed from power completely, and not have a chance of geting it back afterwards. (Although I think the chances for moderation over there would be minimal...)

I don't see a way for Hussein to be dumb enough to do this in the first place, but supposing that Iraq doesn't even pause after Kuwait, how far could they push before overextending themselves to the point of stalemate with local forces?

Iraq isn't going to leave the Iranian border under-defended for long. Given a constraint on how much of their forces can be sent south, they can be tactically superior to the Saudis, but are they really going to be able to take and hold all that territory even without intervention by NATO?

Would it not be likely that the Saudis could conduct a fighting retreat and hold the red sea coast? Taking and holding Riyadh would be a fair bit of an undertaking for Iraq, wouldn't it?

How much of a change in the regime would there be for a Saudi Arabia that holds onto the west, sees its military battered but re-supplied and supported by the US, and which likely retakes the capital with its own ground forces after the marines capture the gulf ports and everything south of Basrah races north or gets cut off?

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Personally, I believed at the time that if he hadn't been stopped, he'd have pushed on. In a bit.

Of course, I was likely wrong then. Certainly Kuwait as the "19th province" of Iraq was probably more than just propaganda. I suspect that Sadam had himself convinced that it was morally right, as well as a huge source of profit to be had. And, while he might possibly have convinced the world that Kuwait was legitimately Iraqi, Saudi would be a power grab pure and simple. And the Saudi kingdom is a prominent US ally.

OT3H, if all he had gotten over Kuwait was a sternly worded diplomatic note or two, he would have to have been tempted. Clearly he misread the US once - if he HAD gotten away with Kuwait, he'd have been even more tempted to misread US intentions....

 

[Brasidas]

Personally, I believed at the time that if he hadn't been stopped, he'd have pushed on. In a bit.

Of course, I was likely wrong then. Certainly Kuwait as the "19th province" of Iraq was probably more than just propaganda. I suspect that Sadam had himself convinced that it was morally right, as well as a huge source of profit to be had. And, while he might possibly have convinced the world that Kuwait was legitimately Iraqi, Saudi would be a power grab pure and simple. And the Saudi kingdom is a prominent US ally.

OT3H, if all he had gotten over Kuwait was a sternly worded diplomatic note or two, he would have to have been tempted. Clearly he misread the US once - if he HAD gotten away with Kuwait, he'd have been even more tempted to misread US intentions....

This is the same country that fought to a stalemate with Iran just a few years earlier and wasn't on the warmest terms with Syria. There's going to be at least some concern about overextending, and a large part of the army just is not available in the middle term.

For Kuwait, there was a claim, it was rich, and it was small. The last part's rather important for avoiding getting dogpiled by the neighbours through spreading the army thin in a war of conquest.

For Saudi Arabia, I really, really don't see Hussein trying to go for "Poland after Czechoslovakia". The only angle I could see would be to try to intimidate the Saudis into throwing out war debt from the Iran-Iraq war.

Conduct a raid, with no intent of actually holding substantial territory.

It'd be stupid, but less stupid than actually trying to conquer the country.

 

[MUC]

The problem may be time.

The US was quick in deploying troops in Iraq, with ground troops arriving less than a week after the Kuwait invasion was carried out. Two carrier battle groups were also in the area within a week.

Unless Saddam moves very fast and his forces manage to rout the Saudis, I expect the US to stop the Iraqis cold short of Riadh. The Iraqis will also face logistic issues the more they move to the south, with their supply lines exposed to US air strikes.

It will be bloody, since US ground troops will mainly be lightly armed, but the Iraqis will lose in the end.

 

[Brasidas]

The problem may be time.

The US was quick in deploying troops in Iraq, with ground troops arriving less than a week after the Kuwait invasion was carried out. Two carrier battle groups were also in the area within a week.

Unless Saddam moves very fast and his forces manage to rout the Saudis, I expect the US to stop the Iraqis cold short of Riadh. The Iraqis will also face logistic issues the more they move to the south, with their supply lines exposed to US air strikes.

It will be bloody, since US ground troops will mainly be lightly armed, but the Iraqis will lose in the end.

How quickly could armoured forces be redeployed from Germany at the time? Reforger had forces going to Germany, so it wasn't the drill, but suppose a decision be made to just do a road move, load onto whatever transport was available in Italy, and unload onto red sea ports?

If you're not waiting to negotiate basing rights, eg. in Syria, just how fast could heavy forces get into play?

 

[Citizen Samuel]

Saudi Arabia may well have collapsed. At the time before US intervention was clear, the vultures were circling. Yemen was openly supporting Saddam and King Hussein of Jordan was making noises about returning his family to their rightful rule of Mecca. Considering the religious implications of letting Christian soldiers into Arabia, the House of Saud turning to the US was an act of desperation.

 

[Bob in Pittsburgh]

In his autobiography Schwarzkopf says that Iraq had pretty well reached the end of their logistics and that by the time they regrouped coalition forces were in place. Still an attack while all the US had in place was two brigades from the 82nd and one from the 101st Airborne would have been a tough proposition for the US. The Saudis had excellent armor but it was initially withheld to protect the capital. Gallows humor about tank speed bumps aside stopping an armored drive would have required a lot of airpower to back up the troops. By August 8 the US Navy had two carrier battle groups in or near the Gulf and the 1st Fighter Wing had 50-75 planes in Saudi Arabia. Based upon the subsequent performance of the US and Iraqi air forces I agree that any such invasion would have been stopped.

 

[ModernKiwi]

From what I have read, simply occupying Kuwait was about the limit of what the Iraqi army's logistics system could support. So charging into Saudi Arabia immediately after taking Kuwait was not going to be possible.

 

[Cook]

In his autobiography Schwarzkopf says that Iraq had pretty well reached the end of their logistics and that by the time they regrouped coalition forces were in place.

That sounds rather unlikely to say the least, despite the source; Kuwait is only just over 150 kilometres (100 mile) long from north to south. Most of the country was secured on the first day of the invasion and all fighting had ceased by the third.

Given that Saddam had 'used a hammer to crack an egg', there doesn’t seem to have been anything to prevent the greater part of the invasion force from bypassing Kuwait City and continuing to roll south, and at the very least occupying the northern oil fields of Saud; the Saudis, like the Kuwaitis, were not on alert and were not mobilized on the 2nd of August 1990.

A mate of mine was in Riyadh at the time, working on contract for the Saudi Air Force, teaching basic flying to students in the PC-9. He described the situation in the city at the time as ‘absolute fucking pandemonium’. He and another Australian instructor decided that if Saddam rolled over the border, their contracts were off. They planned to borrow two PC-9s, fly to a desert highway they knew of half way to Egypt, land and siphon the remaining fuel out of one aircraft into the other and fly on to Egypt in the remaining aircraft.

 

[Herzen's love-child]

That sounds rather unlikely to say the least, despite the source; Kuwait is only just over 150 kilometres (100 mile) long from north to south. Most of the country was secured on the first day of the invasion and all fighting had ceased by the third.
Given that Saddam had 'used a hammer to crack an egg', there doesn’t seem to have been anything to prevent the greater part of the invasion force from bypassing Kuwait City and continuing to roll south, and at the very least occupying the northern oil fields of Saud; the Saudis, like the Kuwaitis, were not on alert and were not mobilized on the 2nd of August 1990.

Yeah, Iraq could have achieved that. But without the fig-leaves of historic claims, and the wink-wink-nudge-nudge Saddam felt he got from a certain member of the U.S. State Dept. These were not unimportant.

 

[ModernKiwi]

That sounds rather unlikely to say the least, despite the source; Kuwait is only just over 150 kilometres (100 mile) long from north to south. Most of the country was secured on the first day of the invasion and all fighting had ceased by the third.

It goes with what I have read. Remember these are the same Iraqi army that screwed up their logistical tracking so badly in the Iran war that at one point they started all over again from scratch abandoning whatever was already in depots. They may have been capable of going 50 or even 100km south of the border, which basically means they just swallowed a whole lot of nothing.

 

[Eldritch Po l i t b u ro]

If saddam launched the war as a simultaneous invasion of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia, and other arab monarchies, could he have marketed it as a secular "liberation" campaign? Would this have garnered him some popular support in saudi arabia and other arab monarchies? His script could've been something like:

Kuwait's oil siphoning is the "last straw" to retake Iraq's "lost province," and they're backed by the saudis so we'll fight them as well, and while we're at it we might as well liberate the rest of the gulf states from their corrupt western backed monarchies too. He then annexes Kuwait and perhaps a sliver or two of northern Saudi Arabia but then installs puppet secular regimes in the rest of the arabian peninsula and maybe even forms a secular arab federation there with him as the leader.

Perhaps saddam making a big deal of him overthrowing kings would make it harder for western countries to sell an intervention to their publics. Then again, maybe they do find the support and proceed to crush saddam and his forces. Maybe the war goes on into 92 or even 93 somehow, but the west almost certainly still wins

 

[CharlesMartell]

Would the Saudi government have collapsed
once the Iraqis took Riyhad? Possibly.
At that point, Meccah and Medina are
real possibilities.
Given a choice between letting Saddam
become the new "custodian" of the holy places
OR allow them to be defended and occupied
by Western Infidels, which do you think the "Arab Street"
would be happier with.
My guess is the former.

And once he has troops sitting on top of most of Saudis oil
wells, what options does the West have. As in OTL if
NATO troops drive his army out, Saddam has the option
of setting everything alight. I dont think the world economy
could cope with 40% of global oil production suddenly
going offline for 3-4 months or however long it would take
to extinguish the fires and get the infrastructure back
in place.

Some "surrender-monkey" countries might decide
to accept Saddam as being not much worse that the
backward absolute monarchist regime he replaced,
and not worthy of spilling blood or treasure.

Keep in mind the timing too.
In 1990 their were early signs the world economy
might be tipping into the recession we ultimately
experienced in 1991/92.
Given a choice between accepting a fait-accompli
in the Gulf and an expensive foreign rescue operation
for the Saudi princes, the former might have won out.

Finally, there is the USSR question.
In OTL, the Soviets backed a Kuwait operation in the UN Security Council.
We have to at least consider whether their vote
would have gone the same way if Saddam was the new "prince of Medina".
If he had become the protector of the holy cities,
it would have been a HUGE boost to his prestige in the Arab
world. Certainly it wouldnt be hard for him to paint the Sheiks
in the House of Saud as corrupt.
I think the Russians had warmer relations with Iraq than they
did with the Saudis so it might have been to there geo-political
advantage to sand-bag any UN military response.
And of course, having Saudi oil pumps under the control of
an unpredictable dictator like Saddam makes "reliable" Russian
oil so much more valuable on world markets.

 

[ModernKiwi]

He's only slightly more likely to reach Riyhad than Germany was to successfully invade the UK.

 

[elkarlo]

Hopefully the Wahibi regime would be removed from power completely, and not have a chance of geting it back afterwards. (Although I think the chances for moderation over there would be minimal...)

Chances are, if it came back, it would become very radicalized. As, we lost our place due to our un piousness. So, now we gotta make infidel heads roll.