Crisis in the Arabian Gulf.

• Author: Drake, Laura

Reviewed by Laura Drake

The above work by Omar Ali, an Iraqi national, provides the unique combination of historical, conceptual, and spatial depth that is missing from most accounts of the Gulf War, and indeed, from a significant portion of scholarship in modern institutional relations. Ali invites us to step into a multidimensional environment, contextualising the crisis and war from a variety of regional-spatial and functional spheres, all of which are intricately woven together to form a rich mosaic of international political interaction.

Ali's chapters are organized around these different spheres, each of which is embedded in the perceptual apparatus of the actors themselves and within the recent historical context of Middle East politics as a whole. Thus, the reader is provided with a longer and much broader view than is common in most of the usual renditions - some of which are characterized by an obsessive focus on the person of President Saddam Hussein, and others of which are of the instant techno-war variety that de-personalize and even de-politicize the conflict, thus epitomizing the "Desert Storm" mentality (i.e., an enormous force that swoops down from nowhere, systematically destroys everything in its wake, and quickly departs).

Two of Ali's chapters link the Gulf crisis to the geostrategic environments in which Iraq was an integral player, including: the Iraq-Iran sphere, Arab-Turkish relations, and the Arab-Israel conflict, especially Iraq's widely-perceived role as the primary strategic counterweight to Israel in the Middle East. Similarly, two chapters are devoted to the superpowers; one is devoted to the United Nations; one to the economic dimension of oil and one to the military dimension of unconventional warfare. Finally, and most importantly, Ali devotes three chapters to internal events in Iraq and Kuwait both before and after the actual war. Since Iraq and Kuwait constitute both the pretext for the war and the theater in which it was conducted, it is only natural that the best analyses, Ali's among them, would be centered conceptually around these two countries. However, such grounded perspectives are, only too often, totally absent from Gulf war analyses.

The author begins by outlining the origins and rationale behind Turkey's involvement in the war, carried out by Turgut Ozal despite internal opposition, in the hope of Turkey replacing Israel as America's number one ally in the Middle East. This is followed by an...