Saddam Hussein

"I would describe it as a biography of the events of the 1990s. It describes a lot about what went on in Saddam’s regime, and very artfully weaves in some reportage that the authors have done themselves. One scene in particular stands out in my mind – when they meet one of Saddam’s sons in a nightclub. There are also some very good accounts of what Iraq was like during the UN sanctions, when life for Iraqis became very difficult. But what you have to remember with this book and all those written in Saddam’s time is that reliable and accurate information is very hard to come by. To try to make sense of it is very admirable. And what is also interesting are the descriptions of how people tried to lead military coups against Saddam using members of the Iraqi opposition, mostly from northern Iraq. It shows just how difficult it was to lead those coups and how formidable Saddam’s intelligence apparatus was. With every single unsuccessful attempt, all the inside agents would be arrested, and so the number of people who knew what was going on became ever smaller. When you read this book you realise that the option of launching a coup, which is something that a lot of people used to talk about, as if to say, “Why didn’t we do that rather than invade?”, was because it was actually hard. It had been attempted numerous times and no one had managed it. To a certain extent the book is dated, but it’s still a good book for providing an idea of the intrigue involved in the CIA-led plots against him and the unreliability of the people the CIA put their hopes in. This is a useful lesson to take away and apply to any country where you think the Americans might be trying to destabilise things. It shows that it’s not an exact science and that often the CIA are not the all-powerful outfit you might expect."