Saddam Hussein accused Kuwait of stealing oil through slanted wells and refusing to forgive a wartime debt, then sent his army across the border on August 2, 1990, and took the whole country in two days; the war that reversed it took five more months to begin.

By the summer of 1990, Iraq fielded the fourth-largest army on earth, hardened by eight years of trench warfare against Iran. What it did not have was money.

What did Iraq actually accuse Kuwait of?

Two things, and Baghdad said both loudly. First, that Kuwait was slant-drilling across the border into the shared Rumaila field, siphoning oil that belonged to Iraq; Iraqi officials put the theft at roughly $10 billion. Second, that Kuwait was refusing to forgive close to $14 billion in loans Iraq had taken on during the war with Iran, a war Saddam Hussein argued it had fought on the entire Gulf's behalf.

There was a third grievance that got less press at the time but mattered just as much: price. Kuwait had spent most of the 1980s pumping well above its OPEC quota, and the glut helped push crude from roughly $20 a barrel down toward $10 in the months before the invasion. Iraq wanted $25 a barrel, debt relief, and cash aid on top. It got none of the three through negotiation.

Here is the honest part: oil engineers who worked the Rumaila field afterward were skeptical that slant drilling on any meaningful scale was even happening; the field produces easily enough that the technique wasn't needed. Whether Saddam believed his own accusation or used it as pretext is not something the documentary record settles cleanly.

How fast did Kuwait fall?

Two days.

Iraqi armor, led by the Hammurabi and Medina divisions of the Republican Guard, crossed the border before dawn on August 2 and reached Kuwait City within hours. The emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, escaped south to Saudi Arabia along with most of the ruling family; a large share of the Kuwaiti army retreated or was overrun before it could organize a defense. By the following day, organized resistance was effectively over, though small bands of Kuwaiti civilians kept fighting from ambush for months.

Did Washington see it coming?

Eight days before the invasion, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie met Saddam in Baghdad and told him the United States took "no opinion" on Arab border disputes. She has always maintained she was repeating standing policy, not issuing a green light, and that "nobody" in Washington expected Iraq to take the entire country rather than a contested strip of it. Historians remain split on how much that meeting shaped Saddam's calculation, and probably always will; the transcript survives, but intent doesn't show up in a transcript.

Why declare it a province?

Within a week, Baghdad announced Kuwait's "total and irreversible" absorption into Iraq, the opening move toward folding it in outright as Iraq's nineteenth governorate, with a hand-picked administration installed in Kuwait City. Looting followed almost immediately: government offices, hospitals, and university labs were stripped of equipment and shipped north, and thousands of foreign nationals were held (some as hostages, some marched to sites of potential military value as human shields). Kuwaiti civilians who resisted were detained, and in a number of documented cases, tortured or killed.

How did the rest of the world respond?

Fast, at least on paper. The UN Security Council condemned the invasion the same day it happened, in Resolution 660, and followed on August 6 with Resolution 661, a sweeping trade embargo covering nearly everything except food and medicine. Within days, U.S. forces began deploying to Saudi Arabia under Operation Desert Shield, and by the fall a coalition eventually numbering thirty-five countries (Egypt, Syria, France, and Britain among them, alongside most of the Gulf's own states) had assembled in the desert south of Kuwait's border. President George H. W. Bush called it a line that would not be crossed again.

Diplomacy ran alongside the buildup for months and produced nothing. Iraq did not withdraw by the UN's January 15 deadline, and five months of standoff turned into war.

How did it actually end?

With airpower first. The coalition opened Operation Desert Storm on January 17, 1991, with a bombing campaign that ran for five weeks against Iraqi command posts, air defenses, and supply lines before a single coalition soldier crossed into Kuwait. Iraq answered by firing Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, an attempt to drag Israel into the war and fracture the Arab states in the coalition; it did not work, and Israel stayed out at Washington's urging. When the ground offensive finally began, on February 24, it lasted roughly one hundred hours: coalition armor swept around Iraq's flank through the desert while Kuwait's capital was retaken from the east, and Bush ordered a ceasefire on February 28 with Iraqi forces in full retreat. Retreating convoys jammed onto the highway north out of Kuwait City were caught and destroyed from the air, a stretch of road reporters afterward called the Highway of Death. Retreating units also set fire to more than six hundred Kuwaiti oil wells on the way out, a scorched-earth act whose smoke plumes were visible from orbit for months afterward.

What outlasted the war itself

Kuwait's government returned from exile within weeks, but the country it governed took years to rebuild: the wells burned into late 1991, and reconstruction costs ran past $50 billion. Iraq, by contrast, emerged under a sanctions regime that lasted through the following decade and a leadership that stayed in power until an American-led invasion removed it in 2003 — a war whose planners cited, among other things, unfinished business from 1991.

The coalition that reversed the invasion became the template Washington reached for again and again over the next three decades: a UN mandate, a broad multinational roster, a defined objective stated in advance rather than an open-ended commitment. Whether that model still holds in a world with more centers of power than it had in 1990 is a live argument, not a settled one, and Kuwait's own security today still rests on the same basic bet it made that August: that a small, wealthy state at the head of the Gulf cannot defend itself alone, and has to buy its safety from someone who can.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Iraqi invasion of Kuwait"
• Wikipedia, "United Nations Security Council Resolution 660"
• Wikipedia, "United Nations Security Council Resolution 661"
• Wikipedia, "April Glaspie"
• Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training, "Igniting Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait – Loans, Land, Oil and Access" (2016)
• Human Rights Watch, World Report 1991, Iraq and occupied Kuwait chapter