Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War.

• Author: De Luca, Duke

In his autobiography, A Child of the Century, the American journalist and author Ben Hecht pointed out that trying to read history in the pages of a newspaper is like trying to tell time with a watch that has only a second hand. Dilip Hiro's attempt to produce a "contemporary history" of the Persian Gulf War in his book, Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War, falls prey to the same miscalculation.

The book is divided into three parts. The first section gives the historical background to the "Second Gulf War," the Iran-Iraq War being the First Gulf War. In this section, Hiro, who is the author of five other books on the Middle East, is on firm analytical ground, citing various texts on the Middle East and using his own extensive knowledge of the politics and history of the region. The second section addresses the period from Iraq's invasion of Kuwait to the start of the war in January 1991, and the last section covers the war and its aftermath up to the end of summer 1991.

In the preface Hiro describes the creation of contemporary history using mass media sources. Most of his sources are newspaper reports or summaries of television or radio broadcasts. Hiro asserts, however, that "journalists were the unwitting carriers of the disinformation peddled by the Pentagon, [that] the media became contaminated," without explaining how he and his sources avoided such contamination. Furthermore, Hiro criticizes another contemporary history of the war, Bob Woodward's The Commanders, on the basis that Woodward failed to interview President Bush; yet Hiro himself lists no interviews as sources. The book reads as though Hiro took notes as the crisis was unfolding and strung these together, unexamined, with some old background material from his previous books. In essence, the reader is left doubting the value of a contemporary history whose sources are contaminated.

In the first section, Hiro ably describes and analyzes the four previous Kuwaiti crises that have occurred over the last century. In each case, either the United Kingdom or the United States intervened militarily to guarantee Kuwait's territorial integrity and the free flow of oil. Hiro does not explain, however, why Saddam Hussein thought that this era of external protection was over. Hiro cites the assassination of scientist Gerald Bull, the Iraqi capture and execution of an Iranian-born British journalist and the Israeli political situation in early 1990 as factors leading...