Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime

Abstract

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S BA'TH PARTY: INSIDE AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME Joseph Sassoon New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (xxi + 314 pages, bibliography, index, i llustrations, and map) $29.99 (paper)Despite the attention that Iraq has commanded in the news media and among policymakers since 1990, the country's history, politics, culture, and economy have remained remarkably understudied. This situation is beginning to change, and Joseph Sassoon's Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party represents a major contribution to recent scholarship. Sassoon poses the question of how Saddam Hussein was able to maintain power through two disastrous wars, crippling economic sanctions, and the prolonged and assiduous efforts of the United States to bring him down. Sassoon's book answers this question with the assertion that the Ba'th Party was critical to maintaining the compliance, complicity, cooperation, and support of a significant segment of Iraq's population until the American-led invasion of 2003.Perceptive surveys of Iraq's history such as those by Charles Tripp (A History of Iraq, Cambridge, 2007) and Phebe Marr (The Modern History of Iraq, Westview, 2012) acknowledge that Saddam's regime successfully entangled and implicated many Iraqis in an elaborate system of patronage and surveillance. Sassoon places the Ba'th Party at the center of this enter- prise, looking inside the party to reveal its machinery and its relationship to other institutions of the state. By examining how the regime rewarded its loyalists, he adds a dimension largely absent from Kanan Makiya's The Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (University of California, 1998), which focuses on the regime's repressive capacity. Sassoon's book explores the party's role in cultural production and thereby complements Eric Davis's Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (University of California, 2005), which explores the regime's endeavor to maintain itself through crafting a hegemonic worldview to impart to its citizens.Sassoon bases his account on extensive use of Iraqi archival sources, among them textual records of the Iraqi government and audiotapes of meetings between Saddam and his close associates, which the United States seized during its occupation. The documents are now archived at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. A second major collection of archival sources that Sassoon exploited is the Ba'th Party Regional Command documents, also taken to the United States in the wake of the invasion. This collection amounts to some six million pages, which have been digitized and made available to researchers at the Hoover Institute on Stanford University campus. Sassoon also draws upon the records of the Iraqi secret police that were seized by Kurds during the March 1991 uprising in the north of the country. These documents include about 2.4 million pages that are archived in digital form at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to the impressive archival research, Sassoon uses memoirs, Saddam's novels and published speeches, and the Iraqi press. He also interviewed a number of Iraqi officials and military officers who served in the Ba'thist regime.From these sources Sassoon reconstructs how the Iraqi Ba'th Party sustained Saddam's rule and constituted, along with the state bureaucracy and military, one of the three key components of the regime. The party's membership represented a reserve labor force that could be called upon to augment the capacity of the bureaucracy, security forces, and military. We learn that the party was hierarchically organized, hyperregulated, and bureaucratized, but also that it was also capable of fostering initiative and competition among its units. It even devoted considerable attention to conducting elections for the leadership of some levels of the hierarchy. Sassoon traces the lives of party members to demonstrate how party activism was professionalized and constituted a full-time career for Ba'thists in the party's upper echelons. …