The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
By Ramsey Clark
New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. 1992. 325 pp. $35
Reviewed by Allen Myers
Ramsey Clark doesn't mince words on the Gulf War. He breathes indignation, backed by facts: "What happened in the Gulf was an assault, not a war. There was no combat, no resistance, and few skirmishes. Iraq had no capacity to either attack or defend. It simply endured a pulverizing six-week assault. The U.S. did not lose a single B-52 in combat, as these planes dropped 27,500 tons of bombs. No Iraqi projectile penetrated a single Abrams tank, while the U.S. claimed to destroy 4,300 Iraqi tanks and 1,856 armored vehicles ... Finally, tanks and earth-moving equipment buried thousands of Iraqi soldiers — dead, wounded, and alive — while hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces and tons of ammunition were seized intact."
Clark's savage and convincing indictment of the US government is all the more surprising and refreshing coming from a man who was US attorney general for eight years during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
This is also a very thorough book. It covers the historical background, the evidence of US efforts to entice Saddam Hussein into an act that would justify war, the Bush government's determination to prevent a peaceful resolution of the crisis and much more.
Clark systematically evaluates the specific actions of the US and its allies, comparing them to accepted international laws and norms and showing that, in many cases, openly proclaimed actions were war crimes according to the Hague and/or Geneva conventions. (For example, if there really were nuclear or chemical warfare installations attacked by the US, bombing them was a war crime.)
He provides abundant documentation, but Clark can also sometimes cut through mountains of propaganda with a sentence: discussing the use of so-called "smart" bombs, he observes, "When the level of civilian damage is measured, to claim the bombs were accurate only proves they were aimed at Iraq's civilian population".
Clark travelled widely through Iraq while it was still under sustained aerial attack, and his accounts of the suffering inflicted — deliberately — on the civilian population are extremely moving. Clark and his companions brought out uncensored film footage of the attacks; all of the major commercial media in the US refused to use it. The media in this war, as he points out, were a US cheer squad, not a source of information.
Ramsey Clark is not, of course, the first person to point out that the Gulf War had more than a little to do with oil. But few have presented such a compelling case on how and why the US wanted and prepared war — well before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The information contained in this book is of ongoing relevance as the US continues trying to ensure its dominance of the Gulf region. This is must reading for anyone who wants to understand what has happened and what will happen in the Middle East.