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Title: Needless Deaths in the Gulf War - Civilian Casualties During the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War (A Middle East Watch Report) by Middle East Watch, Human Rights Watch ISBN: 1-56432-029-4 Publisher: Human Rights Watch Pub. Date: 1991 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $20.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: War is a Messy Thing
Comment: When I picked up this book I was sure that it was going to be 200 pages of a full-scale rant against Bush, the UAS and military operations in general. I was prepared for a full-blown assault on my senses by the way left peace activists. It turns out that I was wrong. The report does take a critical eye at the military operations and there are a few bits of the book that hit an anti-war note, but overall I felt that the reporting was fair. Now do not get me wrong, this report set out to document every mistake or oversight the military made during the war that resulted in civilian deaths. If you think this kind of reporting is anti American then I would suggest you pass up the book (you are probably not even this far given the title).

The authors of the report try their best to be accurate, but the vast majority of their reporting is based on civilian accounts of the situations in refugee camps. I am not saying these people lied, but I would have to say that the average civilian that saw battle damage may not have the full story. Regardless of this, it did seam to me that they tried to get multiple sources for each item and US military backup for each event. I think the most important reason to read a book like this is to get an overall understanding that warfare is a very dangerous and damaging event. Many people are killed or injured and as the people of the USA have not had a war at home for over a 100 years we tend to forget or gloss over the massive damage a modern war does to the civilian population. Overall the book is interesting and not badly written, it is just not going to provide any new earth shattering news.

Rating: 5
Summary: The summary from the back cover says it all
Comment: "Commanders of the allied bombing campaign of Iraq have sought to convey the impression that they took scrupulous care to avoid civilian casualties. While noting that some loss of civilian life is unavoidable in armed conflict, allied commanders have suggested that they took every feasible step to avoid civilian death and injury, as required by the laws of war. This report challenges that excessively rosy picture. Its conclusions are based on scores of interviews conducted during the war with those who fled the bombing, as well as substantial subsequent research and analysis. Middle East Watch concludes that while the allies avoided systematic violations of the laws of war, hundreds of Iraqi civilians died as a result of several allied decisions to take less than the maximum feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties, as required by the laws of war.

"The report also examines the Iraqi missile attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia. Most of these attacks are found to have violated the laws of war by targeting civilians or by being fired into areas where the missiles were not technologically capable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets. Some of these attacks also violated the laws of war because they were accompanied by rhetoric designed to terrorize the civilian population of those countries.

"Middle East Watch hopes that the analysis presented in this report will spark a critical examination of both allied and Iraqi conduct of the air war with the aim of reducing avoidable civilian casualties in any future conflict."