On the morning of February 28, 1991, the military situation was crystal clear. The Iraqi army had been destroyed. Coalition forces controlled the battlefield. Iraqi defenses had collapsed. Saddam Hussein's government was still in place, but its military capability was shattered.

President George H.W. Bush faced a choice: continue the offensive, march on Baghdad, overthrow Saddam, and occupy Iraq. Or stop, declare victory, and establish a ceasefire.

Secretary of State James Baker and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell argued for stopping. Their logic was straightforward. The UN mandate authorized the liberation of Kuwait. It did not authorize the conquest of Iraq or the overthrow of Saddam. International support for the war would evaporate if the United States expanded the war's objectives. Arab coalition members would withdraw. The U.S. would be left occupying an Arab country, fighting an insurgency with no clear exit strategy.

General Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander, had mixed feelings. He later expressed reluctance about the decision, though his exact views at the time were more ambiguous. Some accounts suggest he supported a ceasefire to preserve his army's capability and avoid the dangers of urban combat in Baghdad. Other accounts suggest he advocated for continued offensive operations to fully destroy the Iraqi military.

The decision was ultimately Bush's. At 8:00 AM on February 28, he announced a ceasefire. The ground war, which had lasted exactly 100 hours, was over.

The strategic rationale seemed sound. Iraq's military was destroyed. Saddam's regime would be weakened by the war's outcome. Regional allies were satisfied that Kuwait had been liberated. A ceasefire provided an off-ramp for the coalition before things spiraled into a costly occupation.

But this strategic calculation overlooked several factors.

First, Saddam survived the war militarily intact in key respects. He retained control of the Republican Guard, enough military force to suppress internal dissent and maintain regime control. He used this military force to crush Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in the weeks following the ceasefire. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed in these suppression campaigns—more than died in the Gulf War itself.

Second, the decision left Iraq weak but not broken. Saddam spent the next dozen years rebuilding his military, developing weapons of mass destruction (or appearing to), and challenging international authority. Sanctions on Iraq remained in place, killing tens of thousands through malnutrition and disease while Saddam's regime remained in power.

Third, the regional balance of power shifted in ways unforeseen. Iran, weakened by war with Iraq, began a gradual resurgence. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states remained dependent on American military presence, a source of resentment and instability.

Most consequentially, the decision not to overthrow Saddam in 1991 made the 2003 Iraq War necessary. By 2003, a new Bush administration concluded that Saddam's regime was an intolerable threat. The forces that occupied Iraq in 2003 faced challenges that a 1991 occupation might have avoided. The 2003 war led to a collapsed Iraqi state, which enabled the rise of ISIS, which in turn led to years of conflict in Iraq and Syria.

The decision to stop in 1991 was made by rational people with reasonable strategic logic. But it proved to be one of the most consequential military decisions of the late twentieth century. It allowed Saddam to survive. It left the regional situation unsettled. It planted the seeds for conflicts that would consume the Middle East for the next three decades.

Hindsight is always clearer, but the case can be made that finishing the job in 1991—occupying Iraq, dismantling Saddam's regime, and establishing a post-war order—would have been less costly in the long run than the series of conflicts that followed from the decision to stop.