Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
IDF personnel assess damage to apartment buildings following an Iraqi Scud missile strike, January 1991.
(Getty Images / Image Bank.)
Arafat and the PLO, with enthusiastic popular support from Palestinians, backed the Iraqi
dictator, Saddam Hussein. They believed that the Iraqis would triumph and then turn their
guns against Israel, with the Arab world as a whole following suit. This was a tremendous mis-
calculation since Saudi Arabia, the Kuwaiti government-in-exile, and other Arab governments
saw the support for Iraq as a betrayal and turned against the PLO. The Arabs of the Gulf States
stopped funding the PLO, sending it into a major fi nancial crisis.
After the multinational force attacked Kuwait, Iraq — mistakenly expecting that an attack
on Israel would rally Arab support on its behalf —fi red Scud missiles into Israel beginning on
January 18, 1991. It fi red a total of thirty-nine during the six-week-long war. Israel, worried that
the missiles might have chemical or bacteriological warheads, signaled that the attack could
bring nuclear retaliation, but Iraq lacked this capability, as it turned out.
Israel would have retaliated immediately against the missile launches in accordance with its
own security doctrine, but the United States urged Israel to exercise restraint lest such a strike
widen the war. It promised to destroy the launchers itself — a pledge that was not kept — and
also to send U.S. air-defense systems to Israel, although these proved ineffective.
Since the warheads were small and the missiles inaccurate, only two people were killed di-
rectly in the attacks. But more than 200 were wounded, scores of people died of stress-related
heart attacks or other maladies, and the Israeli economy was largely paralyzed. To ensure that
Israel remained passive under this attack, the United States promised increased support in
compensation after the war, but no specifi c response of this kind materialized following the
Iraqi defeat.
