The 1991 Gulf War outcome motivated both Iraq and Iran to pursue WMD.

Evidence

Already at the time, it was clear that American opinion was far from unanimous on the need to force Saddam out of Kuwait, and that it was only by a narrow margin that the U.S. decided to intervene in this inter-Arab conflict. In Iraq and also in Iran, it was deduced at the time that had Saddam already possessed a nuclear or comparable deterrent, the U.S. would have decided that intervention in an ultimately marginal affair was not worth the risk, and would therefore have left Kuwait—and the Middle East—to their fate. Such a deduction, certainly plausible and possibly correct, underlies the frantic search in both countries for weapons of mass destruction. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1664

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: An ignored scientist’s warning preceded the Gulf War’s radioactive landscape — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 635