The Kiss of Judas: The West's Insane Arming of the Gulf States, the Hypocrisy and the Dramatic Consequences

The Gulf crisis that gripped the world for weeks in early 1991 was very different in character from the Iran-Iraq war of a few years earlier. At that time, the two states had been working each other to death for eight years. Now, Iraq's opponents (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the united Western world) suddenly found themselves face to face with an enemy that had the largest and most modern arsenal of weapons that the Middle East had ever known.

In The Judas Kiss, American journalist and Middle East expert Kenneth R. Timmerman describes how it could have come to this. The Judas Kiss mercilessly reveals how Western governments and companies - including the Dutch companies Delft Instruments (the infamous night vision goggles) and Muiden Chemie-Eurometaal (ammunition for the Bull long-range cannon) - joined forces to support Iraq and its allies - and how Saddam Hussein effortlessly explored his country's oil wealth to achieve his goal: military and political independence for Iraq. The book exposes the silence in Washington, Paris, London and Bonn, where repeated warnings about Iraq's true military intentions were received, and mercilessly shows how strategic insight was overshadowed by the possibilities for enrichment.

The Judas Kiss is a fierce indictment of the hypocrisy and greed of the Western world. But because of the background information and the special source material (it also forms a reference work for those who want to know more about the how and why of the last Gulf crisis, and the way in which Saddam Hussein managed to tyrannize the Iraqi people and pull the wool over the eyes of the rest of the world.