Iraqi War Debrief

It took the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein less that a quarter century to turn the slow march of history in the Middle East upside down. In this short space of time he had twice invaded neighboring countries and cold-bloodedly killed thousands of his own people, let alone those of his enemies, with chemical and biological weapons. Not even concerted action by the forces of more than twenty countries in ‘Operation Desert Storm’ followed by years of not-always-successful UN-imposed arms inspections, prevented him from developing an arsenal of illegal weapons.

Today, just about everybody is vulnerable to fatal airborne infection. For several years, chemical and biological warfare was the first of a two-pronged threat to the Middle East and world peace. The other was Iraq’s nuclear program, which Venter covers here in great detail. There is nothing new about these disclosures; a lot of it has been in the public domain for a decade.

Indeed, UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission (on Iraq) uncovered good evidence that Baghdad had three atom bombs almost built before 1998. All that Saddam needed to arm the devices was fissile material - highly enriched uranium - which, as this book reveals, he was doing his utmost to acquire.
The author also touches on some of the other countries now involved in acquiring weapons of mass destruction of their own: among them Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea.

The Iraqi War Debrief is not an ‘instant’ book. As Africa and Middle East correspondent for Jane’s International Defense Review for the past quarter century, author Al J. Venter has covered these and related events for decades. For Britain’s ‘Jane’s Information Group’ and a host of other publications on both sides of the Atlantic, he has visited most of the countries involved in this gathering storm since first traveling overland from Khartoum to Cairo in 1967.

Al J. Venter is the author of twenty books. For several years he contributed to, among others, BBC, NBC News (New York) and Britain’s Daily Express and Sunday Express.