Current Affairs: Dilip Hiro's account of the Gulf War reveals the religious and ethnic quagmire which awaits the conquerors should they pay a return visit. The book is well-judged and readable writes Bill McSweeney.
A week before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990, the US ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with Saddam Hussein and told him that his border dispute with Kuwait was not a matter of concern to the US government. "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreements with Kuwait." She told him that the US Secretary of State, James Baker, had emphasised the need for such disputes to be settled "through the good offices of your Arab brothers".
The fact of this conversation has never been challenged, though its significance for US attitudes to the invasion of Kuwait has. It seemed a pretty clear signal to Saddam at the time, with Kuwait applying economic sanctions to force the repayment of oil debts from his regime.
At 2 a.m. on August 2nd, Iraqi troops crossed the border. By 10 a.m. that morning, Kuwait was occupied, with its rulers scattered among their Arab brothers in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
By November, the UN Security Council had voted by a 12-2 majority for war against Iraq. (China abstained, while Cuba and Yemen would later pay dearly for their lack of responsibility.) Almost one million troops, including half a million US soldiers and a sizeable contribution from Arab and Muslim countries, took part in the attack to expel the Iraqis, at a cost of 60,000 Iraqi lives and around 200 Western casualties.
When the repressed Shiahs in the south then rebelled against Saddam and were helped by their co-religionists in Iran, there was fear in the West that Iran might unsettle the balance of power in the region. Better to have the dictatorship of Saddam than the ayatollahs of Tehran. Meanwhile, the nationalist Kurds rose up in the north, rousing fears that Turkish Kurds would join them in a pan-Kurdish rebellion. Better Saddam than instability in Turkey.
Dilip Hiro's account of the war which severed the close ties binding Iraqi and Western interests for half a century reveals the religious and ethnic quagmire which awaits the conquerors when they pay a return visit later this month. Curiously, he does not cite the evidence that George Bush Sr actively encouraged these rebellions of Shiahs and Kurds with the promise of Western help, only to renege when his advisers gazed into the can of worms which he had put on the table.
Hiro has been a meticulous chronicler of Middle Eastern politics for the past three decades, with over 20 books to his credit and a reputation for style and objectivity, allied to liberal instincts, which makes him a safe guide to the awful events now unfolding.
Organised chronologically, this book takes us on a rapid tour of Iraqi history before settling on a closer analysis of events from the invasion of Kuwait to the eve of the famous UN Resolution 1441 last November.
There is an absorbing chapter on the relations between Iraq and the UN during the first eight-year period of weapons inspections from 1991 to 1998.
Caught between the cunning of Saddam and the scheming of US intelligence, the UN agency UNSCOM was not up to the task of monitoring and verifying the disarmament process. The basic flaw lay in its composition, with inspectors and technical staff free to continue holding posts in their home countries and cultivating the loyalties that go with them.
Saddam set up a Concealment Operations Committee to cheat the inspectors from the outset of the UN investigations, while Washington secretly engaged in a policy of espionage and subversion using UNSCOM as its cover. For years, these two rival teams of spooks made a mockery of the Security Council's deliberations on disarmament.
We are familiar today with the procedure which requires Hans Blix to report on Iraqi compliance to the Council and with the enormous importance which the world attaches to his integrity. It was not like that in Bill Clinton's day.
Facing impeachment charges for his other activities in the Oval Office, Clinton had his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, meet with the head of the UN inspection team, Richard Butler.
Butler was no Blix. Under pressure from Clinton, he altered his report to provide the excuse Clinton needed to withdraw the inspectors - all done without even informing the Security Council - and to launch a four-day bombing of the benighted Iraqis.
Such were the standards of the day. Monica Lewinsky gets a stained dress and the Iraqis are taken to the cleaners.
Bush is no Clinton. Chastened by Billy Graham and Jesus, fortified by Enron and the Israeli lobby, he has found "the vision thing" which eluded his father. Years before the tragedy of the Twin Towers was seized upon by the Pentagon, the plans were elaborated to make a clean break with the international restraints of the past and to enforce US supremacy on the hopeless politics of the Arab world and beyond. All it needed to win public support was a catalyst, a moment of truth, a Pearl Harbour for the new millenium. In the apocalyptic mindset which now occupied the White House, September 11th was a day to be seized, and a death to be turned to victory.
Hiro notes these older and wider ambitions of the Bush administration in its quest for "worldwide dominance not only in diplomacy but also in culture", but he underestimates their importance in countering the official US argument that Iraqi disarmament provides the justification for war. In this regard, he places too much emphasis on the weaker riposte that it is all about oil.
None the less, this is a book for everyone trying to make sense of the contradictory messages competing for attention on the airwaves. It is well-judged, balanced, analytically astute and readable in a couple of evenings.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin, and is currently Visiting Research Fellow in Peace and Development at the University of Castellon, Spain
Iraq: A Report from the Inside. By Dilip Hiro Granta Books, 271 pp, £8.99