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This chapter analyzes the disarmament of Iraq following the First Gulf War. Disarmament controlled by inspections and monitoring was the cornerstone of the vision set out for Iraq by SCR 687 in 1991. Weapons inspections were the administrative mechanism for the verification of Iraqi disarmament, with sanctions and the threat of force providing the incentive for Iraq to disarm. But for over a decade, Saddam Hussein successfully obscured the degree to which actual disarmament had been achieved, an uncertainty assessed very differently by Paris and Washington. The establishment of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) is discussed.

Charts how the Western powers came to intervene in Iraq after the Gulf War to protect Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Charts how the Security Council adopted in Resolution 688 a new understanding of Chapter VII of the UN Charter that provided the legitimating ground for Western action in the form of the safe havens and no‐fly zones.

This chapter compares and contrast two Gulf Wars, 1990–1 and 2003. It concludes that the First Gulf War, on the whole, met the just‐war criteria. It assesses the different reasons for the Second Gulf War adduced by the US and UK governments (and at different times by Mr Blair); and whether and why the governments believed Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). It concludes that the Second Gulf War, although fought, in the main, for honourable motives, failed fully to meet any of the just‐war criteria. These individual failures built up cumulatively to support the conclusion that the war was unjust, undertaken without sufficient just cause and without adequate planning to ensure a just outcome. The political leaders exercised insufficient practical wisdom. Coalition forces should not, however, now be precipitately withdrawn regardless of the consequences. Those who broke the peace have a responsibility to restore it.

This chapter studies the process that led to the Saudi decision to reestablish a U.S. military basing presence in 1990. Though Saudi Arabia maintained its partnership with the U.S. military throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. was not given control of local bases after 1962 until the First Gulf War. The external threat posed by Iraq was the main driver behind convincing the Saud monarchy to allow a U.S. military basing presence. From 1990 to 2003, the kingdom confronted major domestic security challenges, including several terrorist attacks motivated by the U.S. military basing presence, but it was not until Saddam Hussein was finally removed in 2003 that the U.S. military was asked to terminate its basing presence. Iran also posed less of a threat to the kingdom since U.S. military bases surrounded Iran on both its eastern and western borders, including in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Afghanistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

This chapter develops the central thesis of Chapter 1, namely that paramilitary archaeology is a means of invoking then containing dangerous pasts as an imaginative extension of U.S. foreign policy. Aired in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Stargate (1994) translates the colonial milieu of 1930s Egyptology to the science fictional terrain of Abydos and the battle against Ra. But the shift to the small screen's televisual identity is symptomatic of the deepening complexities of representing geopolitical activity in the region. Just as archaeology passes from a source of wonder into a vehicle for military adventure, the show's ideological commitments to global (read intra-galactic) security become increasingly destabilized, particularly in the Mesopotamian-themed episodes aired after 9/11. The mercurial figure of Babylon offers a counterpoint to the film's overlay of archaeology and militarism, and indeed to the rhetoric of military stewardship at the heart of the "military-archaeology complex." The shifting representation of Mesopotamian antiquity in SG-1's ten-year run (1997-2007) offers powerful cultural criticism of the show's own premise.

This chapter explores the asymmetry-challenge of manned aerial bombing. It first provides a historical overview of the practice, beginning in the nineteenth century and concluding with the 1999 high-altitude bombing of Operation Allied Force (OAF). The chapter will then examine, and distinguish between, the ethical and moral opposition that emerged in response to civilian bombing. This opposition will then be reconsidered in the context of the First Gulf War and OAF. It is within these conflicts that we witness a shift in the locus of the asymmetric-challenge of aerial bombing, from civilian to combatant targeting. The chapter concludes by exploring the gradual resolution of the asymmetry-challenge of manned aerial bombing.