Pelletiere's writings have won for him the little-disputed title of Saddam Husayn's chief apologist in the United States. He retains that dubious honor in The Iran-Iraq War. Saddam threw Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, his predecessor, out of the presidency in 1979, then stripped him of all titles; who other than Pelletiere would characterize Bakr as having been "anxious to step down"? Who else would deny Samir al-Khalil's contention that Saddam rules through fear? Or write about the invasion of Kuwait as though it were a lapse of judgment, "Saddam ought to have had better sense than to invade his neighbor"?
The examples go on and on. Strange logic leads Pelletiere to conclude that the rapid suppression of the southern rebellion in early 1991 means the Iranians, not Iraqi Shi'is, must have organized the uprising. His eccentric reading of Desert Storm permits him to confirm his pre-1991 assessment that the Iraqi army was "professional and of a high caliber."
Pelletiere reads the Iraq-Iran war no less oddly. In place of the conventional understanding of the war's end - that Iraq won through bloody attrition and poison gas - he sees victory resulting from a far-sighted Iraqi strategy and "superior fighting prowess." This, in short, is not the place to find out what happened in that eight-year struggle; of several fine studies, the second volume of Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner's Lessons of Modern War (reviewed in ORBIS, Fall 1990) stands out.
