In literature on US policy in Iraq, the 1991 and 1992 no-fly zones are often relegated to footnotes. Some authors mention the no-fly zones within the broader sanctions regime against Iraq (Graham-Brown, 1999; Alterman, 2003) or in relation to various air operations and its later stages (Hiltermann, 1997; Gibbons, 2002; Cockayne and Malone, 2006). The northern no-fly zone is conventionally viewed as auxiliary to a mostly uncontroversial and largely successful humanitarian mission, an afterthought to the more important Gulf War (Goff, 1992; Helfont, 2023). The southern no-fly zone is even less researched, with only two scholarly contributions focused on it in some detail (Brattebo, 2006; O’Brien, 2021). This may be surprising considering that, at least per President George H.W. Bush and his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, the foreign policy executive's entire ‘planning focus’ at the time had been put on the ‘problems and opportunities which emerged in the aftermath of Desert Storm’ (Bush and Scowcroft, 1999, p 493). The focus on military-strategic and tactical aspects obfuscates insights to be gained from an analysis of the political decision-making process leading up to the instrument's use, showcasing a type of intervention that served as a blueprint for subsequent administrations.

Purely looking at America's international environment, it must remain unclear why no-fly zones were used to ostensibly protect the Kurds of northern Iraq and the Shia in the south. Faced with pervasive uncertainty around the international implications of the Soviet Union's rapid disintegration, the Bush administration (together with its allies) decided to intervene militarily when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, but after its quick victory did not pursue regime change by directly removing Saddam Hussein.