As an Air Force intelligence officer on loan to the Department of Defense, Rick Francona perhaps was ideally placed to write something worth reading about U.S.-Iraq relations in the late 1980s and early 1990s: 

     Close enough to the top to know things we civilians would like to know but not so visible and well known that he would likely suffer repercussions -- political, professional or otherwise -- from clueing us in. 

     The result, "From Ally to Adversary: An Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace," is a small, unexpected gem, a book that gives serious lessons in the paradoxes of contemporary U.S. foreign policy and a book whose author reveals himself plainly and straightforwardly, from start to finish, with little guile or affectation. 

     When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Francona, now a Port Orford resident, and other Vietnamese-language military interpreters were offered the chance to learn new languages. Francona's branch of the service, the Air Force, especially needed speakers of German, Hebrew and Arabic. He chose Arabic, a decision that would eventually bring him key military assignments in the Middle East. 

     In the spring of 1988, Iran -- at war with Iraq for nearly eight years -- was preparing to launch an offensive against the crucial southern Iraqi port city of Al-Basrah. An Iranian victory there, and the potential for a general Iraqi collapse in its aftermath, presented the United States with an "unacceptable" future possibility: a rise in crude-oil prices brought on by Iran's victorious radical-Islamic regime and, more generally, diminished American influence in the Gulf region. 

     Against the backdrop of these strategic concerns, Capt. Rick Francona was assigned to the Department of Defense's "cooperative military-to-military" program providing assistance to the Iraqi armed forces. Between March and July of 1988, he traveled to Baghdad six times, working principally with Iraq's Directorate of Military Intelligence.

     Francona grew to like the Iraqis personally and respect their military might. The American effort to bolster the Iraqis proved successful, and in July, Ayatollah Khomeini announced Iran's acceptance of a U.N. Security Council resolution ending the war. 

     Though nobody in either country expected Iraq and the United States to become permanent allies (in light of their profound differences over Israel's role in the region), the abruptness with which cooperation turned to hostility during the next 18 months was jarring to Francona and others who had worked closely with the Iraqis. 

     When hostility developed into outright conflict between the two countries in August 1990 (following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), those who had so recently observed the Iraqi war-making machine at close hand were deemed essential instruments in the new military effort against the ally-turned-adversary. 

     Francona soon found himself back in the Middle East, this time in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, working in military intelligence and serving as the personal Arabic-language interpreter for General Norman Schwarzkopf. 

     That new military effort -- a U.S.-led coalition consisting of traditional American allies and, more critically, some Arab countries -- successfully defended Saudi Arabia against Iraqi invasion (Operation Desert Shield) and eventually liberated Kuwait from Iraqi occupation (Operation Desert Storm). 

     The campaign, which resulted in 390 American deaths, between 120,000 and 180,000 Iraqi deaths, tens of thousands of additional casualties on the two sides and untold destruction of property and natural resources, concluded in tense cease-fire negotiations that brought Francona face to face with an Iraqi  intelligence officer who had once been his friend. 

     Francona's "eyewitness account," consistently easygoing and understated, nonetheless conveys painful, sober truths for American readers. 

     For example, while intelligent observers, lay and professional, decry an "incomprehensible" American foreign policy that propped up Saddam Hussein's Iraq on one day, crushed it the next, but then opted not to crush it completely, logical explanations (such as Francona's) for these pragmatic, nationally self-interested choices are readily available. (Because they were logical and pragmatic, of course, does not mean that these policies were right, or that we must agree with them; but they are comprehensible.) 

     Why do such enormous gaps exist between popular understandings of foreign policy and the actual calculations of our foreign-policy decision-makers? 

     American presidents and their spokesmen rarely have leveled with the public about the real great-power motives underlying the country's foreign-policy choices. Instead, more often than not, silly sentimentality and phony idealism are used to package ultimately self-interested foreign-policy decisions. 

     When the Bush administration explained its actions in the Gulf War by demonizing Saddam Hussein (our former ally) and by dressing up the Kuwaitis and the Saudis (who would not allow coalition soldiers defending their country to conduct Christian or Jewish religious services on Saudi soil) in the garb of freedom-loving American patriots – barely mentioning the imperative of oil -- they fueled and encouraged the incomprehension that continues to greet each new stage of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
 

Francona, an Oregon resident, who was a top-level interpreter during Operation Desert Storm, has written a fascinating account of what he saw in the Middle East.