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The Toronto Star

May 4, 1991, Saturday

A saga of tawdry double dealing

By Paul William Roberts

Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War

By Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander

....

ANYONE PUZZLED by President George Bush's hypocritical actions during the period immediately following his order reining in Desert Storm's dogs of war will be terminally confounded by Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander's meticulously- researched saga of the tawdry double-dealing strewn along the road leading to this confrontation with Saddam Hussein.

Back when he was CIA director, Bush was personally responsible for the mass slaughter of Kurds by the Baghdad regime, having urged them to revolt, armed them, then failed to provide any backup. Now, as President, he's betrayed them again, and in much the same way, standing in the ditch he calls high moral ground while Iraqi helicopter-gunships and troops butcher countless thousands of men, women and children. If this is "an Iraqi internal affair" in Washington's eyes, then so was the Nazi holocaust. With 200,000 or so troops still within Iraqi borders, Bush apparently sees nothing wrong with upholding Saddam's sovereign right to slaughter any religious or ethnic faction he feels inclined to. Why?

Unholy Babylon provides answers to this and numerous other tricky questions, raising still trickier questions in the process. Darwish is one of the most respected and authoritative investigative reporters covering Middle East affairs. Egyptian by birth, he currently corresponds for The Independent, which consistently provided critical commentary of the war while most Western media waved the Stars and Stripes like hapless vassals. His co-author, "Gregory Alexander," is regarded by those who are aware of his actual identity as one of the two or three supreme experts on international arms trading. He employs a pseudonym and lives in conditions that make Salman Rushdie's arrangements seem positively freewheeling. I'm betraying no confidence by saying he was once a British army officer serving in the Middle East, and then actually worked in the international arms industry for several years before conscience called.

Although people like Judith Miller (Saddam Hussein And The Crisis In The Gulf) and Samir al-Khalil (Republic Of Fear) have done yeoman's work covering similar territory, Darwish and Alexander, besides having access to stratospherically high-level source material, manage a level of concision and readability that makes coherent sense of close to a century's worth of history, much of it deliberately obfuscated, partially erased, or hopelessly tangled to protect the guilty. Who the guilty actually are is Unholy Babylon's main theme.

The book confirms that Iraq's plot to annex Kuwait was made known to most Arab leaders by February, 1990. Both the CIA and the Egyptian intelligence service warned their respective governments repeatedly, stating unequivocally by late September that Saddam's troops would definitely be moving across the border within days. Presidents Bush and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak chose to ignore these warnings. Why?

Reading this chilling and repulsive tale of big politics and even bigger business, you find yourself yodelling why? every 10 minutes. Why, for example, didn't we see much evidence of the $ 50 billion or so in high-tech arms sold by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia over the last few years? Why was America aligning itself with countries that had human rights records at least as bad as those of Saddam's Ba'athist regime they were conscripted to topple? And why did Bush encourage Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to embark on a civil war if he had no intention of supporting them - particularly since he'd stopped Stormin' Norman from trashing Saddam's war machine when the opportunity was available, and thus knew full well the rebels did not stand a chance against the kind of punch Baghdad could still deploy against them?

The truth is - as Unholy Babylon makes abundantly clear - that Washington prefers Saddam, the monster it made, and a Ba'athist reign of terror in Iraq to the prospect of a Kurdistan which could end up controlling the world's second largest oilfields, and a Shiite state in southern Iraq that would inevitably find itself a satellite of fundamentalist Iran. America's fear of Iran, the authors reveal, is indeed so great it must be considered the major factor in the decade-long cultivation of Saddam Hussein's regime - a cultivation that paralleled the lavish U.S. cossetting of the Shah's Iran, entailing techno-military assistance of the first order, including hands-on involvement by numerous American allies in the construction of weapons facilities more advanced than any outside North America or NATO. They became Desert Storm's first targets.

Besides naked greed and the mega-politics of oil, the only thing approaching reasons and answers this book offers is the suggestion that U.S. foreign policy has more to do with chaos and instability than it does with putting order in the "new world order." As long as the U.S. is creating the chaos, it can operate within it quite happily and much more easily than it could within, say, a truly democratic Middle East.

Darwish and Alexander make no comment on the diabolical facts they began assembling even before August 2, 1990 but I'd like to meet the reader who does not finish Unholy Babylon with a sizzling sense of rage, despair and abject frustration aimed at those we have allowed to govern the allegedly-free world and who have abused that privilege by licensing a wrecking-crew to exploit and enslave the wretched of the Earth.

---

Toronto Star Newspapers

July 6, 1991 Saturday

Authors examine the effects of international greed

Unholy Babylon presents a detailed account of the world's financing of Iraq's military machine and the history of events that led to the invasion of Kuwait and the diplomatic posturing prior to the Persian Gulf War.

Authors Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander display a sophisticated knowledge of Arab politics and history and the ruthless practices of the international arms trade. They combine extensive research with broad contacts and experience, giving Unholy Babylon an authority and depth that is both fascinating and chilling.

Darwish and Alexander contend that world leaders ignored warning signals, bungled messages and recklessly pursued their own short-sighted goals in the years and months that led up to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Again and again, they missed opportunities to curb Saddam Hussein's belligerence, even as Iraqi tanks rolled south towards Kuwait.

Furthermore, leaders of the East and West share the blame for helping create Saddam Hussein's mighty war machine.

Generous loans and financing from foreign governments and banks allowed Iraq to spend between $80 and $105 billion on armaments from 1980-90. During the mid 1980s, Iraq became the world's leading importer of arms. Even after the end of its war with Iran, Iraq continued to pump billions of dollars a year into weapons of mass destruction.

A few diplomats and intelligence officials raised murmurs of alarm, but these invariably were side-stepped by businesses and ministries of trade and commerce who were anxious to sell military wares to virtually any nation willing to buy. Effective embargoes were few.

The effects of international greed were compounded by anxious government and military leaders who were willing to do almost anything to stop the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Better Saddam Hussein than the Ayatollah Khomeini, they reasoned. Saddam was pleased to take all the armaments they could offer.

Unholy Babylon makes clear that despite official government policy, most nations are prepared to turn a blind eye when arms sales boost local employment and stimulate the GNP.

As U.S. President George Bush trumpets a new policy of international arms control without controlling arms, the world seems to have learned little. Saddam Hussein is bloodied but unbowed. Billions of dollars worth of armaments continue to flow to the Middle East.

--

Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada)

December 4, 1991 Wednesday

...Readers bemused by the peaceniks' vitriolic attacks upon the Americans for the victory over Iraq will find Unholy Babylon most enlightening.

Written by two respected experts on the Middle East, Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander, the book is sub-titled 'The Secret History of Saddam's War' and reveals much background material not generally known in North America, including Western bungling which allowed Saddam to invade Kuwait with impunity.

Meaty and detailed, yet readily understandable, the book will repay study by anyone wanting more than he finds in the media to understand the Gulf War.

--

The Nation

March 29, 2004

... Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander in their 1991 book, Unholy Babylon, [reported] that Washington was extremely alarmed by Qassim and the Communists, and therefore wooed the Baath Party as an alternative. When the Baath briefly came to power in 1963, the CIA passed to Saddam Hussein, probably an agency asset, a list of hundreds of Iraqi Communists, whom the new regime liquidated. The Baath was in the wilderness when the coup collapsed, but came back to stay in 1968. Again, Darwish and Alexander report assertions of US backing for the 1968 coup, confirmed to me by other journalists who have talked to retired CIA and State Department officials.

Unholy Babylon is the detailed chronicle of the creation of a monster - Saddam Hussein - aided and abetted by the United States and other western powers. The US needed Saddam, in their estimation, to counter the Iranian threat. The US and European countries were willing to tolerate and to support internal totalitarianism and terror, suppression of dissent by force, gas warfare and other war crimes against internal enemies and Iran, as long as Saddam would fight the Iranian menace. The British looked the other way as Saddam murdered dissenters on their soil. Everyone looked away as virtually every country in Europe, plus the US and Canada, lined up to supply Saddam Hussein with long range rockets and essential atomic bomb technology.
Adel Darwish is eminently qualified for the job of investigating Saddam's empire, having been a veteran foreign correspondent in Iraq before he was thrown out for reporting a major missile testing mis-hap and thus revealing Saddam's secret missile development program.
The hard cover edition of Unholy Babylon has been updated and corrected and is probably well worth the extra investment.
Read this book to understand what is happening now. It has been the source book (sometimes not acknowledged) for several "informed analyses."...