Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party

The Ba'ath Party came to power in Iraq in 1968 through Saddam Hussein's military coup and ruled that country until the U.S. invasion of 2003. Like most modern authoritarian regimes, Hussein's government produced and archived documentation of its policies, programs, and general activities. In April 2003, occupation forces captured millions of these documents and thousands of recordings of Hussein and his close Ba'ath Party associates, amounting to a treasure trove of firsthand information about Ba'athist Iraq and the inner workings of the Hussein regime. In this fascinating and highly informative book, Sassoon (adjunct, Ctr. for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown Univ.), an Iraqi-born scholar, relies on the captured documents to provide a first-rate analysis of how Hussein and his associates ruled Iraq. Unlike books on Hussein's Iraq that have relied largely on secondary sources, this one benefits from the author's heavy use of primary material hitherto unavailable.