La prima guerra del Golfo

the long version

This history of Kuwait sweeps away prejudices, mystifications and, above all, the acrimony that television coverage of the Desert Storm operation aroused among public opinion. The author, an Italian diplomat who lived in the Emirates from 1993 to 1998 retraces the history of this tiny nation starting from ancient times (Hellenic Greece, the eastern expansion of Rome, the Sasanian empire) setting it into the subsequent context of Islamic history, continuing through the Portuguese and later the Ottoman domination, the first world war, the discovery of oil, and the second world war to the so-called "oil age" and stopping, for personal reasons, in 1987, before the Iraqi invasion.