Lines in the Sand

Keith Kyle

• Saddam’s War: The Origins of the Kuwait Conflict and the International Response by John Bulloch and Harvey Morris
  Faber, 194 pp, £13.99, January 1991, ISBN 0 571 16387 4
• Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam’s War by Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander
  Gollancz, 352 pp, £9.99, January 1991, ISBN 0 05 750505 5
• Cambridge International Document Series: Vol. 1 The Kuwait Crisis edited by E. Lauterpacht, C.J. Greenwood, Mark Weller and Daniel Bethlehem
  Grotius Publication, 330 pp, £35.17, January 1991, ISBN 0 949009 86 5
• Air Power and Colonial Control by David Omissi
  Manchester, 260 pp, £35.00, January 1990, ISBN 0 7190 2960 0

Of all the many guises in which Saddam Hussein has appeared before the Iraqi people and the world, the most surprising was that of the great white hope of Arab moderation. Formerly known as a rejectionist – a last-ditch opponent of a negotiated Palestine settlement – he emerged in 1987, under the strains of a war against Iran which he appeared to be losing, as a charter member of what the Jordanians were describing as ‘the great moderate centre’. The other members of this new alignment were Egypt, Jordan and the PLO; it was part of the shift in policy towards Israel which the Palestine National Council finally endorsed in November 1988.