The Gulf in flames
Why David Ransom won't buy the authorized version of the Gulf War.

Patriarchs and petroculture
Nawal El Saadawi tells the story of how Arab women have been hit by Desert Storm.

Crazy for oil
Paul Rogers uncovers the origins of military confrontation in the Gulf

Simply - Manufacturing consent

Storm damage
Ordinary Arab people are paying the heaviest price for the Gulf War. We take you on a whistlestop tour: Abdulaziz Al-Saqqaf reports from Yemen, Jill Hamburg from Jordan, Andrew Cohen from Sudan, Ian Williams on the migrant labourers from Iraq and Kuwait.

THE GULF WAR - THE FACTS

The cavalry takes charge
The coffee's cold and the soda water's flat at the UN Security Council. Olivia Ward describes how hopes faded on the diplomatic front line.

Torching the Earth
Who were the real environmental villains? Joni Seager investigates.

Not in our names
Alastair Hulbert and Alastair Mcintosh recall how they resisted the War.

ACTION

To be an editor here you also have to be a picture researcher. Once you've finished honing your contributors' prose and laid down your grand plans for the magazine you set off for the picture agencies. There you rifle through files and, if you are me, you get distracted by the pictures and forget what it is you're looking for. Often you're after something like 'a positive image of bicycles which includes human interest somewhere in the Pacific'. There's probably only one and you're sure to have used it before.

This time, with the Gulf War, I thought finding the right pictures would be easy. But after I'd been working for a while I began to feel quite ill. Only once before have I seen so many sickening pictures in such a short space of time, and that was when I was still in my teens, at a memorial to the holocaust in Dachau. Now a procession of mutilated bodies in the Arabian Desert passed before my eyes, caught in grotesque poses, carbonized.

I was shocked that despite all the TV I watched, the newspapers and magazines I read while the War was on, I had not seen most of these pictures before. Nor, despite my general sense of outrage at the War, had I felt so sharply what it must have been like to be on the receiving end of the most savage bombardment since World War Two.

Researching the Gulf War you keep bumping into simple truths spoken only in whispers, if at all. We all knew that the Gulf War was really about oil but for the most part we preferred not to say so. Now, as I write, we can be pretty sure that President Bush is sitting down somewhere plotting his next move against Saddam Hussein and that no-one round the table with him will say what they all know to be true, that the point is to win the next US Presidential Election for George Bush.

But it's as well not to get too superior about such things. I have a beloved godson who kept a scrapbook during the War. It's filled with graphic illustrations of all the fancy ironmongery, the battle plans and so forth - the sort of thing that grabbed me when I was a boy. He would thumb through it zapping this and that, crying 'brilliant!' and uttering blood-curdling oaths against Saddam Hussein, and I would reprove him for keeping it. I borrowed it off him to do this magazine. I'm not quite sure whether I owe you an apology, but thanks anyway, James.

Letters
Letter from Lahore
Updates
Reviews: plus Carpentier classic
Curiosities
Endpiece: by Israel Shamir
Country profile: Malaysia

FRONT COVER PHOTOGRAPH: ABBAS / MAGNUM
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