February 28 in Military History — On This Day

⚔️📍 Ripon, Wisconsin1854

Republican Party Founded — Precursor to the Civil War

Former Whigs, Free Soilers, and anti-slavery Democrats met in Ripon, Wisconsin to form a new political party dedicated to opposing the spread of slavery. They named themselves Republicans in reference to Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans.

The Republican Party's formation in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act directly set the political stage for Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 and the secession crisis that led to the Civil War.

Outcome

Republican Party formed; Lincoln elected 6 years later

Ceasefire at Safwan

At 8:00 a.m. on February 28, 1991 — exactly 100 hours after the ground war began — President George H.W. Bush declared a ceasefire. The following day, General Schwarzkopf met Iraqi generals at Safwan Airfield in southern Iraq to negotiate terms. In an agreement later criticized by many analysts, Schwarzkopf allowed Iraq to continue flying helicopters (which Saddam immediately used to suppress Kurdish and Shia uprisings), and the ceasefire line left large Republican Guard formations intact. Saddam Hussein, though militarily defeated, remained in power. The terms planted seeds that would grow into the 2003 Iraq War twelve years later.

The Safwan ceasefire ended the Gulf War in 100 hours of ground combat but left unresolved the question of Saddam Hussein's regime — a decision that haunted American foreign policy for the next decade and led directly to the 2003 invasion.

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Kosovo War

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had been waging a guerrilla insurgency against Serbian security forces since 1996, but full-scale war erupted in February 1998 when Serbian police and military launched massive counter-insurgency operations that killed entire families in villages suspected of harboring KLA fighters. The Račak massacre of January 1999 — in which Serbian forces killed 45 Albanian civilians — crossed a threshold that NATO could not ignore after Srebrenica. When peace negotiations at Rambouillet failed in February 1999, NATO launched its air campaign. Serbian forces simultaneously accelerated a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, expelling over 850,000 Kosovo Albanians into Albania and Macedonia in a matter of weeks. The combined weight of NATO bombing and international pressure finally forced Yugoslav forces to withdraw from Kosovo in June 1999.

The Kosovo War established the precedent of humanitarian intervention without UN Security Council authorization — a radical departure from international law that NATO justified as necessary to prevent genocide, and which Russia and China condemned as illegal aggression. The war produced what would become the 'Responsibility to Protect' doctrine and directly led to Kosovo's eventual declaration of independence in 2008. It was also the first time in history that a functioning state was stripped of territorial control by an international military alliance without a UN mandate.

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