Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader

by Phyllis Bennis (Editor)

Book by

412 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1991

Reviews

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 1 out of 5]

A heads-up about this book: It's not really a reader at all. A reader should be a collection of essays and documents that survey an issue, field, or historical time period/event. A reader doesn't have to be ideologically neutral, but it should give you a sense of the major sides of a conflict. This book is not a reader. It's is a collection of rants and screeds (with 2 or 3 thoughtful essays thrown in) by leftists who all say basically the same thing: The Gulf War was an imperialist, racist, orientalist crime solely executed for the purposes of hegemonic dominance and the control of oil. If the bodies language that's so popular now had been around back then, this book would have been full of lines like this: "The U.S. attacked Iraq in order to destroy brown bodies, and control brown bodies, just as it does at home." The articles in this collection are almost uniformly lazy. They make no effort to explain how the major decision makers on each side came to their major policies. Instead, they simply assigned the most nefarious possible intents to the main actors and treated that as fact. They repeated the tired, hollow canard that the US couldn't have genuinely seen the conflict in international law and human rights terms because it hadn't respected these things in other contexts. The only articles that were even remotely useful were about how different countries in the region (Jordan, Kuwait, etc) dealt with the crisis, especially the tension between populations that opposed US intervention and the geopolitical interests of the state. These essays also never seriously wrestle with the question of how anyone could have gotten Saddam out of Kuwait without force. No one talked about how he was literally dismantling and absorbing the entire country as we waited for sanctions to work. Once again, you get a bunch of purist leftists (this problem exists on the right too, obviously, but is less common in academia) who have never held much real responsibility in their lives not taking seriously the burdens of leadership and decision and then excoriating those who do.

This book is so far to the left that the Noam Chomsky article in it actually seemed a little conservative. Many of the authors aren't very well credentialed (many of them were little more than socialist book store owners, it seemed), and they were obsessed with linking the Iraq crisis to the Palestine problem. This shows, in part, that they bought Saddam Hussein's desperate, cynical ploy to link these conflicts. There is a potentially interesting link between the Islamic world's support for Saddam Hussein's actions and it's support for the Palestinians, but this link needs to be examined by more balanced scholars.

In sum, this is a blinkered book coming from a blinkered worldview. I probably wasted my time reading it given how long it was, although I definitely know the far left view of the Gulf War pretty well now. This book would only be really useful for someone studying leftist politics or Palestinian history, but you won't learn much new about the Gulf War.