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There is not a single government involved in the Kurdish tragedy which is not playing politics with the fate of that unhappy race. Saddam Hussein is bent on asserting the government's central authority; the Turkish and Iranian governments are trying to give succour whilst avoiding even the appearance of support for the independence of their own Kurdish minorities; the United States and Britain are giving a confused and confusing response to this latest stage in the Middle East's seemingly endless story of violence and misery. The picture stamped indelibly on the mind is of vast human suffering being endured against a background of scheming and squabbling politicians.

The Gulf crisis must have looked fairly simple to the participants when it started. Saddam Hussein assumed he could walk into Kuwait, confronted by little more than the odd ritual denunciation from the UN Security Council and some timid squeaks of protest from the GCC states. The Bush administration thought that it could put a lot of firepower in place and show who, in the last event, was in control. No-one seems to have thought through the possible subsequent sequence of events and – to be fair – neither side could have been expected to predict their course.

Events in the Gulf in the second half of August have followed a trend which was already identifiable during the earlier course of the crisis but which is now falling into a distinct pattern. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq appears to be prepared to adopt any strategem which will either secure him whatever gains he can make out of the mess he has created or minimise the losses he may incur.

There will still be more than 200,000 American troops sweltering in southern Iraq, even after the planned withdrawal of 20,000 men by mid-April. Unavoidably, the US troops have become elements in Iraq's civil war. More and more Iraqi refugees, needing all the necessities of life, have flooded into American camps, escaping from President Saddam Hussein's merciless assertion of authority over the rebellious Shia population of the south. The thousands of refugees, most without any resources of their own, need all the basic necessities of life and there is no- one to whom they can turn except the American troops.

Last week, Dick Cheney, the US defence secretary and Colin Powell, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, flew out to Saudi Arabia to consult with General Norman Schwarzkopf, the US commander, about the timing of an allied ground offensive against Iraq. The obvious assumption was that the United States wanted to get the long-awaited attack under way as soon as possible and before the renewed momentum towards peace talks inhibited military action.

Restored to independence by foreign arms, Kuwait now has a new government. Despite the turmoil and destruction of past nine months, the ruling Al Sabah family has not seen fit to broaden the basis of representation in the cabinet to include personalities of noticeably independent persuasion.

Does Iran actually have a coherent foreign policy that can be interpreted by the outside world? Even posing the question alone goes some way to pointing towards a negative answer. On the one hand, Western hostages in Lebanon, held by Iranian- backed groups, have been liberated at an astonishingly accelerated rate over the past few months. On the other hand, the Iranian government chose to mount a "counter conference" to the Madrid peace negotiations underlining its support for the rejectionist camp, while Hizbollah is widely suspected of perpetrating a bomb attack on the American University of Beirut (AUB) early in November.

President Saddam Hussein's invasion and annexation of Kuwait marks a watershed in Middle East politics, at least as important as his attack on Iran in 1980 and arguably as significant a turning point in Arab affairs as any of the traumatic wars with Israel since 1948.

The catastrophic earthquake in north-western Iran has resulted in 100,000 casualties, half of them dead. The disaster has shocked Iran and, understandably, led to heated political over-reaction. It may seem rather callous for Gulf States Newsletter to focus on the political repercussions (at home and overseas) of the cataclysm rather than the human tragedy – but it was, after all, the Tehran Times which carried a headline announcing that "Earthquakes can be a blessing in disguise".

The Soviet Union as known of old effectively no longer exists after last week's declaration by Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian federation of a separate "commonwealth " of Slavic states. President Gorbachev's plans for a reformed union of the constituent republics of the USSR has for all intent and purpose collapsed in the wake of Yeltsin's political coup de grace.

Over the past month there have been Some extraordinary revelations about Iraq's international military procurement procedures. Nuclear bomb trigger devices en route to Baghdad have been seized in Britain and large sections of specialist tube piping, allegedly for a giant rocket launcher, were confiscated by British Customs officers.

President Saddam Hussein of Iraq has taken a step closer to attaining the role (at least as the first among equals) of spokesman of the Arab world and the defender of its interests. That was about all the emergency summit in Baghdad achieved – which was just as Saddam wanted it. The final communique looked suitably aggressive as a script, fitting yet devoid of any actual decisions on policy measures which, if applied, could prove divisive within the Arab community which he clearly aspires to lead

Iraq's President Saddam Hussein must be congratulating himself on a particularly good month. In pursuit of his blatantly obvious goal of establishing himself as the pre-eminent leader of the Arab world, he has bullied Opec into a new, coherent strategy on prices and production and scared the wits out of his Arab Gulf neighbours.

In the foolish and extravagant language that has now become the commonality of Iraqi official written and spoken expression, truth has been turned on its head and straightforward communication abandoned in favour of hyperbole and invention, According to official Baghdad, the invasion of Kuwait was to liberate an oppressed people, the ignominious retreat of the Iraqi forces from Kuwait was a glorious Iraqi victory, the wretched plight of the ordinary Iraqi people is the result of international conspiracies against Iraq, and the Iraqi government's brutal military and punitive economic campaigns against Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi Shias are simply implementations of enlightened social policies,

The aftermath of the devastating military defeat in the Gulf War has brought to bear upon Iraq crippling UN economic sanctions, large-scale rebellions by its northern Kurdish and southern Shia populations, the abiding hostility of neighbouring Gulf states, international isolation and a post - war CIA budget of forty million dollars devoted to the overthrow of its president and government.