The Persian Gulf War

The fires in the background are the oil wells in Kuwait which Saddam Hussain's retreating troops set on fire.

The Gulf war took place between 1990 and 1991. The actual invasion was in January and February 1991. It involved Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Egypt also had a minor part to play.  It was a U.N Action of the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq to push Saddam and his troops out of Kuwait.

Saddam Hussain was the dictator of Iraq, and interestingly he was a Sunni Muslim which made him a minority in Iraq. America supported Iraq in the Iraq/ Iran war by giving them money to fund their army.  Iran, at this time, was supported by the USSR, which was one of the reasons that America supported Iraq. Saddam was also financially supported by Saudi Arabia and Egypt. However, after a while Iraq got into huge debt and owed billions of dollars, and so both Saudi Arabia and Egypt refused to lend him any more money.

Meanwhile, Kuwait (Iraq’s neighbouring country) was also in debt and so to get out of this debt they were overproducing oil, which meant that the price of oil would go down. This was a violation of the OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) agreement. Therefore, Saddam put the blame on Kuwait and said that they had been stealing their oil. Saddam laid down almost impossible demands on Kuwait, which they couldn’t fulfil, and said that unless they meet these demands then Iraq would invade Kuwait. Kuwait refused to comply.

'Officially known as Highway 80, the Highway of Death runs from Kuwait City to Basra in Iraq. During the Gulf War (1991), it became the scene of one of the most haunting images of the war.'

In 1990 Iraq started moving 1 million troops towards the Kuwait border. Towards the end of 1990 Saddam started heavily bombing Kuwait. In response to this the U.N (heavily supported by Saudi Arabia and Egypt) were intent on rescuing Kuwait. On the 2^nd of January 1991 the action of the Desert Storm was put into place.  In this only around 300 of the U.N troops were killed as opposed to 20,000 – 30,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians.  Of the 300 U.N troops ¼ of them were killed in friendly fire. This is very interesting to me because as Don Jon I know that I tried to kill my brother of the battle field, this shows that it would not have been too obvious that I was trying to kill him and so my brother, to have realised what I was trying to do, must have already thought of me in a particularly bad way and lacked all trust in me.

The remarkable thing about this war was that for the first time you could get access to live coverage of the war. I found this very interesting because it justifies the reasons for why Don Pedro and his troops were seen as almost celebrities, because people had seen the soldiers on television and would have admired their heroism.

To conclude this teaches me a lot about the context of our play and the characterisation of Don John. One aspect of this, which could be good to think about was that, a lot of soldiers came back from the war feeling ill etc. This was called ‘the Gulf war syndrome’ and affected the soldiers both mentally and physically. It could be fun to play with this and maybe use this a reason for Don John strange and evil behaviour throughout the play.