The Fire This Time: The U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf.

This book is an angry although measured polemical outcry over the U.S. "great victory" in the Gulf War of 1991. Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney-General and long-time international peace activist, asserts that, in actuality, the Gulf War was not really about reversing Iraq's aggression against Kuwait, but rather to "control nationalist challenges to U.S. interests in the area." To do this, the nation that was questing for military superiority in the area would have to be destroyed. A collateral U.S. goal was to "secure the region and achieve vast geopolitical power into the next century through control of its' (the entire Gulf area) oil resources." This was all part of a long-time U.S. and Western plan to "dominate and exploit the Third World."

In this volume, Clark indicts, among others, the United Nations (which since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has become an adjunct of U.S. foreign policy). He recites how Security Council members, particularly those from the Third World, were either bribed or bullied to support the U.S. position (with the notable exceptions of Cuba and Yemen). Congress, despite the War Powers Act, was effectively neutered in a skillful, bipartisan fashion by the Bush Administration (with Congressmen such as New York's Stephen Solarz, long an AIPAC ally on the hill, helping to run interference. A notable exception was Rep. Henry Gonzalez of Texas, who actually had the "temerity" to talk of an impeachment resolution).

The Bush Administration further covertly encouraged Kuwait to take a tough line toward negotiating with Iraq, which the Administration "hoped would push Saddam Hussein into invading." U.S. Ambassador Glaspie also informed Iraq that the U.S. would have no position on inter-Arab border disputes. The Administration additionally refused any meaningful negotiations with Iraq while at the same time effectively cowing the U.S. media with an official line from which dissent was deemed borderline treason (witness the remarks made by Minority Whip Simpson during the war over the reporting of CNN's Peter Arnett from Baghdad). Clark indicts the mainstream mass media in the U.S. as willing accomplices in a campaign of lies, deceit, and treachery directed at the American public as to what was really happening in Iraq and why. Even the New York Times and Washington Post, long-time whipping boys of the Right in this country, dutifully fell into lock step with the Administration's view of the situation. The Times later editorialized that if any war could ever be deemed just, this was a "just war."

Clark believes that the entire military action of Operation Desert Storm was a deliberate targeting of civilians, who died in the hundreds of thousands, and that all it's perpetrators (George Bush, J. Danforth Quayle III, James Baker, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, and Norman Schwartzkopf) are war criminals. Following the precedents of Nuremburg and the Bertrand Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal in Europe in the 1960s, Clark argues that all of these men should be judged internationally. In one of several appendices, Clark notes that this was done in February 1992 and that a guilty verdict for all was rendered.

This is an interesting and, to say the least, highly provocative book. Clark is scrupulously careful to document all of his charges with extensive citations. Although he may seem something like a lonely, solitary voice crying out in the wilderness, I believe that it is worth noting that by 1993, much of the lustre had faded from the once-gilded U.S.-coalition victory during Operation Desert Storm. In years to come, more credence may well be given to many of the arguments in this book, which originally were widely thought to be the shrill ravings of a marginalized political activist. With the euphoria of 1991 long faded, new considerations are tenable.

I think that this book would make an excellent companion volume in any academic courses dealing with the Gulf and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East during the volatile period of shifting alignments of the Eighties and early Nineties. Although Clark seems to become sidetracked to rather peripheral issues in the concluding chapter ("A Vision of Peace," wherein he calls for nothing less than a radical democratic socialist transformation of the U.S., arguments and conclusions best left to another volume), the compelling fact that his arguments received so little media coverage before, during, and after the conflict is a serious indictment of the purported, adversary role of the U.S. media today. I can well remember when CBS' anchor Dan Rather (long considered to be anti-Bush by the U.S. right wing) completely forsook his objectivity and embraced U.S. military commanders in the field in Saudi Arabia at the conclusion of the major hostilities.

Might not books like The Fire This Time serve as the basis for a serious discussion of issues before similar U.S. actions in the future?

Thomas W. Mullen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Dalton College.