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Электронное приложение к журналу «
Международная жизнь
»
Author : D. Khristenko
Post-graduate student at the World History Department, Yaroslavl State University
THROUGHOUT the last twenty years Iraq has al-
ways been in the center of the world community's
attention. Back in 1990, the military operation code-
named Desert Storm (1990-1991) waged by a multi-
national coalition of 26 states (America, France, the
U.K., and Saudi Arabia among others) was one of
the first military conflicts when a new system of in-
ternational relations was being formed on the ruins
of the bi-polar world. Its importance exceeded by far the region's limits1; in a certain sense
it was a point of bifurcation that hinted at serious global changes on the world political
scene.
The book by American author Kevin Woods The Mother of All Battles3: Saddam Hus-
sein's Strategic Plan for the Persian Gulf War4 can be described as a fresh approach to the
American-Iraqi relations of that time based on the Iraqi documents captured in Baghdad
occupied by Americans in 2003.
In an effort to grasp the logic of Saddam's strategies in the Gulf War Kevin Woods for-
mulated four main tasks: to present the maximally unbiased picture of the period; to ana-
lyze it; to visualize the war as it was seen by the enemy and to demonstrate how the United
States and Iraq adjusted themselves to the postwar situation (p. XXI).
Kevin Woods devoted a large part of his book to an analysis of how the Iraqi leaders had
appraised the international situation during the war and why Saddam Hussein had been
convinced that his regime had profited from it.
The author's comments and conclusions are highly interesting. The authoritarian regime
did not allow the military to subject the failures at the front to an honest and unbiased
analysis lest it cast doubt on the country's political leadership and its authority. This is
Woods' main conclusion. He has written that even though the Iraqi leader readily admitted
tactical errors and blunders he never permitted an honest and unbiased discussion of fun-
damental miscalculations that caused failures at the front. Kevin Woods has rightly written
that in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes the military tend to curb their initiative on the
battlefield which means, the author concludes, that Hussein would have been unprepared
to accept an explanation that associated lack of initiative on the battlefield with the nature
of his regime.
Readers in Russia will be especially interested to learn that during the Gulf War Baghdad
Looking Back at the Gulf War of 1990-1991