ABSTRACT
The result of the 1991 Gulf War was a symbiotic enhancement of the credibility and authority of both the United States (US) and the United Nations (UN). The metamorphosis of the United States from a global leader marshaling a worldwide coalition to win the first Iraq war to a belligerent defying most of the international community came in three stages namely a division over purposes, the decision to go to war, and the collision over Iraq’s reconstruction. Most of the world saw the attack on Iraq as a fundamental breach of the peace, illegal under the UN Charter, as Secretary-General Kofi Annan ultimately acknowledged. For Americans, achievement of the goals globally agreed would likely have been unsatisfying even if Iraq were neutered militarily; its Arab majority would still have been left under a brutal tyrant who had launched two wars of aggression. Iraq has become the graveyard for ambitious designs of twenty-first-century US global supremacy.
