It was, moreover, such a blatant breach of the norm of state sovereignty that condemnation was general in the United Nations. It caused strategic alarm in the West, where it was feared that the Iraqi forces that swept through Kuwait in a few days might carry on into Saudi Arabia, leaving Saddam in control of much of the world's oil reserves. Iraq's invasion invoked a furious international response. This, combined with the refusal of the Gulf monarchies to cancel Iraq's debt, soured Iraq's relations with these states, particularly as Saddam earnestly felt that he had protected countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from revolutionary Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini. Kuwait consistently failed to observe OPEC's production quotas designed to restrict the supply of oil and thereby keep the price high, at a time when Iraq desperately needed to extract the highest price possible. The only way for Iraq to pay its debt and rebuild its economic infrastructure was by exporting oil-of which Kuwait had a great deal. The deep cause of the invasion, however, was the exhaustion of Iraq at the end of the Iran- Iraq War (1980–1988), which saddled it with a debt of $80 billion, at least $10 billion of which was owed to Kuwait. Iraq had long had an irredentist claim on Kuwait stemming back to the days of the Ottoman Empire, at which time the southern region of Iraq around Basra and what is now Kuwait both belonged to the same province. The Gulf War resulted from the invasion (2 August 1990) of Kuwait by Iraq, which led to United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolutions 660, demanding immediate Iraqi withdrawal, and 678, authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to force Iraqi compliance, both of which were rejected by the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The two Gulf Wars, the latter often called the Iraq War, may be seen as a single conflict involving two periods of major combat, in January–February 1991 and March–April 2003, separated by a twelve-year strategic pause (which in turn was punctuated by several sharp air campaigns).
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