This important study seeks to address the issues of state building and regime security as key variables affecting and determining a foreign policy-making process during a crisis and confrontation. Mohamedou proceeds from the notion that decision makers' dispositions matter their worldview, ideology, beliefs, and axioms play a role in state building as well as the historical operational environment (societal, regional, and international). The case this study is concerned with is the Second Gulf War, initiated on August 2, 1990, with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and which came to an end on February 28, 1991, after a military confrontation between Iraq and an international coalition of twenty-eight countries led by the United States of America.