Arming Iraq, by Mark Pythian, Northeastern University Press, 325pp, £28.50 in UK
This is the kind of book for which the cliche "damning indictment" was invented. Mr Phythian is a lecturer at Wolverhampton University. He quotes much documentary evidence to show that the US and Britain "maintained a public stance of neutrality" in the Iran/ Iraq war (1980-88) while covertly "supplying arms to both sides".
Control proved difficult. The US arranged for Israel to arm Iran in 1981. A former US Ambassador said that "Israel and private international arms dealers . . . shipped [more arms] than anyone in the Administration wanted". American tank spares and PLO arms and ammunition captured in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon were sent. Defective SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles were found by an American officer just before despatch. The British Government also allowed the arming of Iraq.
Revolutionary Iran had violated long-standing diplomatic protocols by holding American Embassy personnel hostage for 444 days. Diplomatic isolation resulted. Officially, the supply of US arms and spares ceased.
The former head of the Central Bank of Iran is quoted as saying: "The British were not loyal to [the US] during the hostage crisis. The UK ambassador . . . at that time . . . told me that the British were prepared to sell military equipment to us despite the embargo." And sell they did.
Twenty-eight states are said to have supplied both Iran and Iraq. Sixteen supported Iran alone and nine Iraq alone.
Phythian says that around 1982 "American intelligence agents warned that Iraq was on the verge of being overrun by Iran". Direct assistance, including intelligence, was given. "This is not to suggest that the US desired an Iraqi victory, just that US interests lay in fostering a long and bloody conflict, with no victor." Unusually, there is no immediate reference backing up this Realpolitik view, but thirty-one pages later the everblunt Alan Clark is quoted: "It was clear to me that the interests of the West were well served by Iran and Iraq fighting each other."
And so this "bloody eight-year war - the longest conventional war of the twentieth century" resulted in an estimated 400,000 Iranian and 300,000 Iraqi dead plus a million Iranian and 800,000 Iraqi wounded. Iran's revolution was consolidated.
Why did Iraq attack Iran? There were Iranian broadcasts calling for Shia revolts throughout the Gulf region; 55 per cent of Iraqi Muslims are Shias. Phythian shows the big political and economic benefits a victory would bring to Iraq. The year 1980 seemed a good time to attack Iran, because revolutionary purges had weakened her forces.
Phythian sets oil in its context: "It has been, and still is, the major form of energy consumed in the post-war world. Oil, because of cheapness, availability, flexibility and relative ease of transportation, became the primary energy source for most industrial countries . . . the energy industries, and oil in particular, are strategic industries par ex- cellence."
The West feared losing its influence over the "important issues in oil politics" - access, reliability of flow and stability of price. Arming friendly states should facilitate this - and recycle back to the West some of the petrodollars earned by the oil states. But overarming the Shah's Iran contributed to his downfall.
Gerald Bull's Super-gun and his murder, the Astra and Matrix Churchill Cases, the Howe Guidelines, Iran-Contra and the Scott Inquiry are covered in Phythian's carefully referenced way. Shall we see a rebuttal?
The book's Machiavellian lessons are: countries dependent on outside arms suppliers should be wary of the seductions of politico/ economic ambition and the missionary imperatives of fundamentalism; also, never attack a revolution.
E.D. Doyle has served in UN peacekeeping operations in Congo, Cyprus and Lebanon; he was Chief UN Observer in the Sinai