Deterring Democracy has nothing to say about the lamentable failure of the Iraqi top brass to finish Stormin' Norman's job and bump off Saddam Hussein. It is silent on the crushed uprising of the Shiites in Basra and the Kurds in the north, tacitly encouraged by the United States and then decimated by Iraqi bombers. There's nothing here about the readiness of the liberated Kuwaitis to attack and brutalise their Palestinian population, and then hand down 15-year jail sentences for the crime of wearing a Saddam Hussein T-shirt. Then there are the huge contracts negotiated by the US Army even before the liberation for American firms to rebuild Kuwait, the stabilised price of crude oil, General Schwarzkopf’s Florida victory parade and honorary knighthood – all these post-war events, these successes, bunglings and concomitants of American foreign policy, Chomsky omits.

These gaps, simply a result of the date the book went to press, can easily be filled by the reader as a mental postscript, further illustrations for Chomsky's catalogue of Nefarious Aggression (as he calls his Gulf War chapter). It's a long list, and anyone familiar with the author's earlier