| Sumario: | Friedman also points to the structural weaknesses in the coalition formed to fight Saddam Hussein. That coalition eventually included most of the NATO powers. While Britain shared the American view of Saddam and the need to defeat him by direct military action, European governments were less enthusiastic, had disapproved of the American air strikes on Tripoli in 1986, and feared for their trading links with Iraq and the rest of the Arab world. This meant that it was important that sponsorship of opposition to Saddam Hussein was led by the United Nations rather than the United States. This was possible because the Soviet Union needed Western cooperation for its reconstruction at the end of the Cold War. The constitution of the coalition also meant that any clear-cut conclusion to the war was difficult to achieve. Friedman suggests, perhaps controversially, that the American view at the end of the war seems to have been that it would be best for Iraq to be decisively defeated and for internal groups such as the Kurds to achieve partial or complete independence. Such a solution would have presented difficulties for coalition partners like Turkey and Iran, which had substantial Kurdish minorities of their own. The Kuwaitis and Saudis feared a triumph of Shi...ites in the south of Iraq as that might have achieved the same situation as an Iranian victory in the Iran-Iraq War. Saudi Arabia and Iraq wanted the continuance of the Sunni regime in Iraq. Friedman speculates that the State Department feared that the elimination of Iraq as a state would leave a power vacuum for Syria and Iran to fill. He suggests that “a close observer of the U.S. official reactions to the Kurdish and Shi...ite risings after the end of the Kuwait war would notice a perceptible shift from tacit support to neutrality permitting Saddam to win” (p. 58). Simons, at the outset, insists that his book is not an apology for Saddam Hussein. In his analysis of the background to the Gulf War, Simons argued that Washington gave Saddam Hussein “an unambiguous, albeit coded, message to ”Go Ahead!“ He goes on to insist that for domestic reasons, Washington determined to fight a war that would result in few American casualties, and this necessitated the use of overwhelming force against the enemy. Between January 16(th) and February 27(th) 1991 88,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq, an explosive tonnage judged to be the equivalent to seven Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, ”a scale of destruction that has no parallels in the history of warfare“ (pp. 4-5). This bombing ”was designed to destroy Iraq's moral and social cohesion.“ The evidence suggests that ”the main aim of the US military planners was to destroy Iraq as a viable social system“ (p. 13). As the American naval blockade of Iraq, introduced without congressional authority, covered items like medicines, water purifiers, hospital equipment, infant milk formula and food, it was ”in effect an act of war to deny the Iraqi population the means to life“ (p. 17). Simons insists that the Gulf War, together with the economic sanctions, changed Iraq into a polluted and radioactive environment; ”in fact to deny a nation the means to purify water or to treat sewage -- and so to encourage the spread of disease -- is a form of biological warfare“ (p. 33).
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