Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War

The Toronto Star May 4, 1991, Saturday A saga of tawdry double dealing By Paul William Roberts Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War By Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander .... ANYONE PUZZLED by President George Bush's hypocritical actions during the period immediately following his order reining in Desert Storm's dogs of war will be terminally confounded by Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander's meticulously- researched saga of the tawdry double-dealing strewn along the road leading to this confrontation with Saddam Hussein. Back when he was CIA director, Bush was personally responsible for the mass slaughter of Kurds by the Baghdad regime, having urged them to revolt, armed them, then failed to provide any backup. Now, as President, he's betrayed them again, and in much the same way, standing in the ditch he calls high moral ground while Iraqi helicopter-gunships and troops butcher countless thousands of men, women and children. If this is "an Iraqi internal affair" in Washington's eyes, then so was the Nazi holocaust. With 200,000 or so troops still within Iraqi borders, Bush apparently sees nothing wrong with upholding Saddam's sovereign right to slaughter any religious or ethnic faction he feels inclined to. Why? Unholy Babylon provides answers to this and numerous other tricky questions, raising still trickier questions in the process. Darwish is one of the most respected and authoritative investigative reporters covering Middle East affairs. Egyptian by birth, he currently corresponds for The Independent, which consistently provided critical commentary of the war while most Western media waved the Stars and Stripes like hapless vassals. His co-author, "Gregory Alexander," is regarded by those who are aware of his actual identity as one of the two or three supreme experts on international arms trading. He employs a pseudonym and lives in conditions that make Salman Rushdie's arrangements seem positively freewheeling. I'm betraying no confidence by saying he was once a British army officer serving in the Middle East, and then actually worked in the international arms industry for several years before conscience called. Although people like Judith Miller (Saddam Hussein And The Crisis In The Gulf) and Samir al-Khalil (Republic Of Fear) have done yeoman's work covering similar territory, Darwish and Alexander, besides having access to stratospherically high-level source material, manage a level of concision and readability that makes coherent sense of close to a century's worth of history, much of it deliberately obfuscated, partially erased, or hopelessly tangled to protect the guilty. Who the guilty actually are is Unholy Babylon's main theme. The book confirms that Iraq's plot to annex Kuwait was made known to most Arab leaders by February, 1990. Both the CIA and the Egyptian intelligence service warned their respective governments repeatedly, stating unequivocally by late September that Saddam's troops would definitely

Unholy Babylon is the detailed chronicle of the creation of a monster - Saddam Hussein - aided and abetted by the United States and other western powers. The US needed Saddam, in their estimation, to counter the Iranian threat. The US and European countries were willing to tolerate and to support internal totalitarianism and terror, suppression of dissent by force, gas warfare and other war crimes against internal enemies and Iran, as long as Saddam would fight the Iranian menace. The British looked the other way as Saddam murdered dissenters on their soil. Everyone looked away as virtually every country in Europe, plus the US and Canada, lined up to supply Saddam Hussein with long range rockets and essential atomic bomb technology. Adel Darwish is eminently qualified for the job of investigating Saddam's empire, having been a veteran foreign correspondent in Iraq before he was thrown out for reporting a major missile testing mis-hap and thus revealing Saddam's secret missile development program.The hard cover edition of Unholy Babylon has been updated and corrected and is probably well worth the extra investment.Read this book to understand what is happening now. It has been the source book (sometimes not acknowledged) for several "informed analyses."...