The Ba'th Party came to power in 1968 and remained for thirty-five years, until the 2003 US invasion. Under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, who became president of Iraq in 1979, a powerful ...authoritarian regime was created based on a system of violence and an extraordinary surveillance network, as well as reward schemes and incentives for supporters of the party. The true horrors of this regime have been exposed for the first time through a massive archive of government documents captured by the United States after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is these documents that form the basis of this extraordinarily revealing book and that have been translated and analyzed by Joseph Sassoon, an Iraqi-born scholar and seasoned commentator on the Middle East. They uncover the secrets of the innermost workings of Hussein's Revolutionary Command Council, how the party was structured, how it operated via its network of informers and how the system of rewards functioned.
The Saddam Tapes Woods, Kevin M; Palkki, David D; Stout, Mark E
09/2011
eBook
During the 2003 war that ended Saddam Hussein's regime, coalition forces captured thousands of hours of secret recordings of meetings, phone calls and conferences. Originally prepared by the ...Institute for Defense Analyses for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, this study presents annotated transcripts of Iraqi audio recordings of meetings between Saddam Hussein and his inner circle. The Saddam Tapes, along with the much larger digital collection of captured records at the National Defense University's Conflict Records Research Center, will provide researchers with important insights into the inner workings of the regime and, it is hoped, the nature of authoritarian regimes more generally. The collection has implications for a range of historical questions. How did Saddam react to the pressures of his wars? How did he manage the Machiavellian world he created? How did he react to the signals and actions of the international community on matters of war and peace? Was there a difference between the public and the private Saddam on critical matters of state? A close examination of this material in the context of events and other available evidence will address these and other questions.
When US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, they occupied a country that had been at war for 23 years. Yet in their attempts to understand Iraqi society and history, few policy makers, analysts and ...journalists took into account the profound impact that Iraq's long engagement with war had on the Iraqis' everyday engagement with politics, the business of managing their daily lives, and their cultural imagination. Drawing on government documents and interviews, Dina Rizk Khoury traces the political, social and cultural processes of the normalization of war in Iraq during the last twenty-three years of Ba'thist rule. Khoury argues that war was a form of everyday bureaucratic governance and examines the Iraqi government's policies of creating consent, managing resistance and religious diversity, and shaping public culture. Coming on the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, this book tells a multilayered story of a society in which war has become the norm.
Scholarship on Iraq under the Ba’th regime has traditionally focused on the rule of Saddam Hussein and his narrow inner circle. The centrality of the former president in Iraqi politics until spring ...2003 and the tyranny of his regime were evident, and available sources concerning developments inside Iraqi society during that period were scarce.
This book explores whether traditional paradigms of totalitarian rule can be applied to Ba’thist Iraq, closely examining state-society relations and uncovering the nature of the regime and how Iraqis lived with it. The study creates a conceptual framework for understanding the inner dynamics of a dictatorship that encompasses a variety of disciplines - comparative historiography, political science, literary and art criticism, and gender studies. Drawing on a comparative reading of the historiography of other regimes commonly perceived as totalitarian dictatorships, particularly Nazi Germany, the author looks beyond the spheres of state politics, economy and jurisdiction to also include the so called ‘soft issues’ of social norms, cultural and ideological production. By interpreting recent Iraqi history along such lines, the author demonstrates how cross-regional comparative perspectives and an interdisciplinary approach can contribute to the study of Iraq.
Introduction: Facing Dictatorship Part 1: The Rise and Fall of an “Instant Power” 1. Authoritarianism and Development: The 1970s 2. On the Way to Armageddon: Iraq in the 1980s 3. Fragmentation vs. Centralisation: Governing Iraq, 1991-2003 Part 2: Power and Society 4. Gender Politics in Ba‘thist Iraq 5. Arts and Politics. Conclusions
Achim Rohde is the scientific coordinator of the research network "Re-Configurations. History, Remembrance and Transformation Processes in the Middle East and North Africa" at the Philipps-University Marburg (Germany).
Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq as a dictator for nearly a quarter century before the fall of his regime in 2003. Using the Ba’th party as his organ of meta-control, he built a broad base of support ...throughout Iraqi state and society. Why did millions participate in his government, parrot his propaganda, and otherwise support his regime when doing so often required betraying their families, communities, and beliefs? Why did the “Husseini Ba’thist" system prove so durable through uprisings, two wars, and United Nations sanctions? Drawing from a wealth of documents discovered at the Ba’th party’s central headquarters in Baghdad following the US-led invasion in 2003, The Ba’thification of Iraq analyzes how Hussein and the party inculcated loyalty in the population. Through a grand strategy of “Ba’thification," Faust argues that Hussein mixed classic totalitarian means with distinctly Iraqi methods to transform state, social, and cultural institutions into Ba’thist entities, and the public and private choices Iraqis made into tests of their political loyalty. Focusing not only on ways in which Iraqis obeyed, but also how they resisted, and using comparative examples from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, The Ba’thification of Iraq explores fundamental questions about the roles that ideology and culture, institutions and administrative practices, and rewards and punishments play in any political system.
This book represents the first comprehensive overview of the US-Iraqi relationship since 1979 and the first attempt to place the 2003 American invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq in that wider ...historical context.Using a modified version of World Systems Theory, the book places American policy toward Iraq at the centre of a number of dynamics, including America's dominant role in managing the world capitalist system, the fundamental importance of Persian Gulf oil to that system, and long-term change in the American political system.It argues that American policy towards Iraq since 1979 has been shaped above all by the importance of Persian Gulf oil to the world economy and the consequent need to restore America's position as regional hegemon and guarantor of the global oil supply, which had been destabilized by the Iranian revolution.It also emphasizes the role of American domestic politics and above all the 'conservative ascendancy' which brought George W. Bush to the presidency, as a critical factor in explaining the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Key Features*Provides a comprehensive analysis of US-Iraqi relations from 1979*Demonstrates that the second Iraq War is a result of a longer historical process and not just the product of 9/11 and the War on Terror*Deepens understanding of the underlying factors of US policy towards the Persian Gulf, and its oil*Uses World Systems Theory to analyse US foreign policy
Using data from the NLSY79, we structurally estimate a dynamic model of the life cycle decisions of young women.The women make sequential joint decisions about school attendance, work, marriage, ...fertility, and welfare participation.We use the model to perform counterfactual simulations designed to shed light on three questions: (1) How much of observed minority-majority differences in behavior can be attributed to differences in labor market opportunities, marriage market opportunities, and preference heterogeneity? (2) How does the welfare system interact with these factors to augment those differences? (3) How can new cohorts that grow up under the new welfare system (Temporary Aid for Needy Families) be expected to behave compared to older cohorts?
What was it like to live in Iraq before the earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century? The mid-seventies to the late eighties witnessed Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, the establishment of ...Kurdish autonomy in the north, and the Iraq–Iran war. It also brought an influx of oil wealth, following the 1973 war and the spike in oil prices, and a parallel influx of Arab talent, including many Egyptians. We witness all of this and more through the eyes of an Egyptian woman married to an engineer working in Iraq. The narrator, who works for an Egyptian magazine’s bureau in the Iraqi capital, has a behind-the-scenes view of what was really happening at a critical juncture in the history of the region. Moreover, she has a mystery to solve: an Iraqi woman from the marshes in the south has disappeared, and as the mystery unfolds we learn of her love for an older Egyptian Marxist journalist. This is Iraq before and beyond Saddam, Iraq as the Arabs knew it, in the lives of interesting people living in a vibrant country before the attempted annexation of Kuwait and the American invasion. This is the Iraq that was . . .
Draft lottery number assignment during the Vietnam Era provides a natural experiment to examine the effects of military service on crime. Using exact dates of birth for inmates in state and federal ...prisons in 1979, 1986, and 1991, we find that draft eligibility increases incarceration for violent crimes but decreases incarceration for nonviolent crimes among whites. This is particularly evident in 1979, where two‐sample instrumental variable estimates indicate that military service increases the probability of incarceration for a violent crime by 0.34 percentage points and decreases the probability of incarceration for a nonviolent crime by 0.30 percentage points. We conduct two falsification tests, one that applies each of the three binding lotteries to unaffected cohorts and another that considers the effects of lotteries that were not used to draft servicemen. (JEL K42, H56)
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