Review Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam Hussein And The Crisis In The Gulf, Times Books, 1990

  

Today Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie are infamous. Miller cozied up to the Bush administration and Ahmed Chalabi before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and helped spread their propaganda about weapons of mass destruction to justify the war. Mylroie supported Iraq and then felt betrayed by the invasion of Kuwait and turned into a conspiracy theorist blaming the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 on Baghdad. Saddam Hussein And The Crisis in The Gulf was written before all that and is surprisingly good. It stands as a decent background to Saddam and the Gulf War. Not only that but it was very cynical about the cause of the conflict.

 

Most of the book is background to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It has chapters on the history of Iraq from ancient times to the rise of Saddam Hussein through the Baath Party and then his taking power as leader of the country. There are others on U.S. oil policy in the Middle East and Kuwait. It’s a very standard and pretty thorough review of these issues and stands up against other books written about the conflict and even those about the 2003 invasion.

 

What’s surprising is that the two authors did not buy much of the Bush administration’s justification for the Gulf War. They did not believe that the U.S. was against Iraq because Saddam was Hitler. They bring up how both Reagan and Bush supported Iraq despite his various crimes during those years and then welcomed another dictator Hafez al-Assad into the anti-Iraq coalition.

 

Instead they focus upon oil and were even skeptical of that justification. They argued that the U.S. was afraid that by taking Kuwait Baghdad would be able to threaten and intimidate Saudi Arabia and raise the price of oil which would threaten the world economy. It questioned whether this was feasible. They did not believe that Iraq was going to invade Saudi Arabia and noted that the U.S.’s allies in the West and Japan were far more dependent upon Middle East oil than America. They wrote that the U.S. was trying to maintain a world order rather than protect its own immediate interests. The book wondered whether this was worthwhile.

 

Miller and Myrolie also believed that U.S. policy towards Iraq was a failure. The Reagan administration tilted towards Saddam when Iraq began losing the Iran-Iraq War because it wanted to contain the Islamic republic in Tehran. After the war President Bush maintained the policy believing that it could moderate Baghdad and create another ally in the Persian Gulf. It was against Congress sanctioning Iraq, wanted to maintain agricultural sales to Baghdad, and ignored Saddam’s increasing threats against Kuwait believing it was just intimidation instead of a lead up to an invasion. Washington completely misread Iraq and the result was the Gulf War.

 

Saddam Hussein And The Crisis In The Gulf provides a good history to the Gulf War and some biting criticism of the Bush administration for its handling of Iraq. That’s completely surprising given what the two authors are now known for today. The two did some good research and it shows in their writing and analysis. It stands up to others giving background to the conflict.

 

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