EXPERTS are still debating who won the Gulf War a question that no one would be dreamed of asking in the first heady days after the 100 hour ground offensive in January 1991.
The facts are not in doubt the US and its allies sent Iraq's troops fleeing from Kuwait as the coalition reversed the takeover of a tiny country by its larger, more powerful neighbour, thus preventing an ambitious dictator from controlling a major share of the world's oil.
But five years later, many experts are asking whether the liberation of Kuwait and the safeguarding of its oil were, or should have been, the only goals.
Some experts argue that leaving Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein in power was a disastrous move. Others, like the historian, Gabriel Kolko, argue that turning Iraq into the enemy was the major mistake as it removed the country as a vitally needed counter balance to expansionist Iranian power in the Gulf.
Not even the former British prime minister, Mrs Thatcher, is sure who won.
"There is the aggressor, Saddam Hussein, still in power. There is the president of the United States, no longer in power. There is the prime minister of Great Britain, who did quite a lot to get things there, no longer in power. I wonder who won?", she told the US television series, Frontline, in a documentary aired this week.
Nor is retired US Marine Corps Lieut Gen Bernard Trainor, one of the leading US experts on the war, convinced that the war ended in the no holds barred victory that the Bush administration and its allies claimed.
"It was an inconclusive war...a modest victory that was snatched from the jaws of triumph," Gen Trainor told the same Frontline programme. He repeats these views in a highly praised book on the conflict he wrote with Michael Gordon called The Generals' War.
The pair argue that the US, afraid of exposing the coalition's troops to high casualties and of ugly publicity caused by shooting Iraqi troops like silting ducks on the "Highway of Death" from Kuwait, ended the war much too soon.
In summoning the nation to war, Bush had described Saddam Hussein as `worse than Hitler' and painted the conflict as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil. But when it came to waging war against the new `Hitler', the allied armies, as it were, stopped at the Rhine", they claim in their book.
An Israeli defence expert, Mr Amos Perlmutter, editor of The Journal of Security Studies and a professor at Washington's American University, says "If the purpose was to liberate Kuwait, the war succeeded. If the purpose was to depose Saddam Hussein and destroy his Republican Guards, then it failed."
Mr Perlmutter said Israel was told by the Bush administration that the goal of the war was to topple Saddam Hussein and that this was known and approved of in Arab capitals. Untoppled, Saddam Hussein remains as much a threat to his neighbours and to the West as he was before.
"The UN embargo against Iraq punishes the Iraqi people, not the regime. He continues with his nuclear programme. It is serious. Iraq is building a mighty military forced"
But Mr Kolko, author of Century of War, a study of the 20th century's conflicts, offers a contrary opinion. "The US position is gravely weakened by this war. Every one saw as clear as day that they had to keep Saddam Hussein because taking him out would have convinced Iran to move into Iraq.
"In the end it may have been smarter not to have gone to war for Kuwait. It was a political defeat for the US in the long run, a long term geo political error."