Bush School To Host Symposium On Gulf War And Liberation Of Kuwait

The Bush School will host the “Symposium on the Gulf War and the Liberation of Kuwait: Reflections after a Quarter Century” on Feb. 18.

The event, from 4-7 p.m. at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center, will bring together leading scholars, journalists, diplomats, and students of international affairs to discuss the events surrounding the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the country’s liberation in February 1991, and lessons learned in the 25 years since the conflict. The symposium is a part of a series of events taking place at the Bush Center to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Desert Storm.

The evening will begin with a presentation by a Bush School capstone seminar on U.S.-Kuwaiti relations. The work on the subject is sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, and the students will travel to Kuwait the week after the symposium to present their work as part of Kuwait’s commemoration of the 25th anniversary. The capstone seminar is led by Robert Holzweiss, deputy director of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, and the research is based in large part on documents at the Bush Presidential Library.

Following the event, there will be a panel discussion titled “The Gulf War: Causes and Consequences” from 4:30-5:45 p.m. The panel includes Jeffrey Engel, a professor at Southern Methodist University and author of a forthcoming book on the foreign policy of President George H. W. Bush; F. Gregory Gause III, department head of the International Affairs Department at the Bush School and author of The International Relations of the Persian Gulf; and David Palkki, assistant professor at the Air War College and co-editor of The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime.

The final event of the evening will be a conversation between Amb. Ryan Crocker, dean of the Bush School, who served as director of the Iraq-Kuwait Task Force in the State Department during the crisis, and Caryle Murphy, who reported for the Washington Post from occupied Kuwait during the first weeks after the Iraqi invasion and has since had a distinguished career as a journalist in the Middle East. She is currently at the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

The Bush School symposium is open to the public, but reservations are required. To register for the event, visit bush.tamu.edu/Kuwait.

A week before the Bush School symposium, the Bush Library will host an issues forum on Feb. 11, featuring Stephen Douglas Wiehe, author of G-Day: Rendezvous with Eagles, which provides a first-hand account of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm from a member of the 101st Airborne Division.

And on Feb. 25, the Bush Library will host a panel discussion with participants of the Battle of 73 Easting, often described as “the last great tank battle of the 20th Century.”

The Bush Library events are open to the public, but reservations are recommended. To reserve your seat, email reservations.bush@nara.gov or call 979-691-4068. For more information, visit http://bush41.org/events-listing.