The Ba'th Party came to power in 1968 and remained for thirty-five
years, until the 2003 U.S. 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. Saddam Hussein's authority was
dominant. His decision was final, whether arbitrating the promotion of a
junior official or the death of a rival or a member of his family. As
this gripping portrayal of Saddam Hussein's Iraq demonstrates, the
regime was every bit as authoritarian and brutal as Stalin's Soviet
Union or Mao's China and some of the regimes in the Arab world who are
witnessing upheavals, are not not dissimilar from the Ba`th regime.
