Joseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and holds the al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St Antony鈥檚 College, Oxford, where he also completed his PhD. Professor Sassoon, whose research focuses on political economy, economic history, Iraq, Iraqi refugees, and authoritarianism, has published extensively and is the author of five books.
This excellent book looks at the Ba'ath regime in Iraq, the secret police organizations in that country and the cult of personality that surrounded Saddam Hussein. Joseph Sassoon looks at Iraq as a totalitarian state and uses information gleaned from the fascist regime's own internal records to illustrate it. Saddam's social control over Iraq and the mechanisms employed to maintain it would be familiar to any student of Germany's Hitler or the USSR's Stalin: monitoring of the citizenry, medals and other perks to supporters of the state, utilization of informants, hero worship of the head of state, ruthless punishment of dissidents and corruption of the rank-and-file (i.e., making them participants in the crimes of the party). Illustrated with photos of some party documents.
I was forewarned it would be dry, so no surprises there - but if you need to know what Mr. Hussein's Ba'ath party was all about, in all its nitty-gritty pervasive nastiness, this is probably the #1 resource.
This book was a very in-depth look at the functioning of the Ba'ath party in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Though it can be a bit dry at times, ultimately it is very insightful.