Customer Reviews

Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book presents valuable insights into post-gulf war Iraq and the political intricacies of Saddams regime. Given the recent major terrorist incidents, the study of Iraq and its dictator holds great relevance. Iraq had used chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds, and was known to have ambitious programs to build a biological, chemical and nuclear arsenal. Thanks to the UN sanctions, its economic prowess has been significantly weakened. Otherwise, it could be both a formidable terror state as well as resource-rich sponsor of terrorism worldwide. But an Iraq under Saddam cannot be underestimated; it is and has always been a very real threat. What should be USs policies towards this rogue state? Well, read this book and maybe you would have formed some answers in your mind.

Out of the Ashes was good book and a timely one. Its greatest strengths are the authors' description of Hussein's family and its murderous pattern of doing "business."

But it's not a perfect book. I got the impression that some events were glossed over by the Cockburns. There is also a very faint aroma of anti-American sentiment. The authors find much to criticize --particularly Scott Ritter-- but only spend a paragraph or so at the very end of the book suggesting how we can deal with Saddam.

It is hard to imagine how a better book on the subject of Iraq since the Gulf War could be written. Andrew Cockburn - based in Washington, DC and Patrick - based in Jerusalem - are able to make use of an incredible assortment of inside sources to take us step-by-step through the US's (in most cases the CIA's) disastrous non-strategy of the past decade. Illogical and inconsistent policies, the betrayal of allies, lost opportunities, a continued failure to support viable oppostion movements - it's all here, crisply narrated.

What really sets this book apart is the authors' astounding ability to elicit surreal humor from the most evil of situations - for example a first-hand account of Saddam's murdurous son Uday (who is also Chair of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, which has its own prison) discussing with his very fat and very drunk Armenian tailor (known as 'the philosopher') the relative merits of Liberace and Engelbert Humperdinck.

I read this book this weekend at a single sitting, and I am proud to add it to my extensive library of Middle East policy studies. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

If you are looking for one book to give you a thorough background on Iraq and its relations with the US, this is it. The Cockburn brothers have refused to dumb down the information, and yet have written a book that is accessible to all curious readers. Their lively account of the rise of Saddam and his Baath party held my attention throughout, reeling me in with good stories, while at the same time communicating the highly complex workings of the Iraqi government over the past several decades. Operating in ignorance of historical context is a dangerous game. The Cockburns go deep beneath the surface of Iraqi politics to give us the tools to understand the present situation. It's too bad that the administration apparently failed to read this book before barrelling ahead with war. Don't make the same mistake! Read the book, get the facts, and draw your own conclusions.

This book will fascinate anyone with a deep interest in the Gulf War. The Cockburns show us what was happening on the other side, within Iraq. We're given a rich portrait of what life is like in Hussein's inner circle, the functioning of the various anti-Hussein factions, and the CIA's unsuccessful efforts to foment Hussein's overthrow. Hussein's atrocities are fully documented, as is the incompetence of the CIA - no one comes out of this book smelling like a rose. The Cockburns argue that the US should have pushed on to Baghdad during the Gulf War, and they're harsh toward the US for its naive hope that somehow, against all odds, someone will overthrow Hussein. The most shocking part of the book is an account of an attempted CIA-backed coup in 1996, in which the CIA allowed the coup to go forward in spite of hard evidence that Iraqi authorities had advance knowledge. The result was that many Iraqi dissidents, working under the CIA's leadership, were sent to their imprisonment and death.

The Cockburns harshly criticize the US's ongoing blockade of Iraq, despite their own account of Hussein's determination to develop biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. The Cockburns end their book with the prediction that somehow the Iraqi people will rise up against Hussein. Yet the authors spent most of the book criticizing the US for taking exactly that same stance - naively hoping for an uprising. This glaring inconsistency is an incredible flaw in an otherwise fascinating book.

This book was so full of facts, including detailed names of an entire chain of people involved in Iraq that the meaning and overall picture got lost in all the detail. I started to wonder if all these statements of fact were actually correct or just the authors opinion. This book is not for the average person seeking to learn more about Sadam and the Gulf War. I would say it's more of an historical reference or scholarly textbook, provided the statements presented as facts can be verified, and not appropriate for a leisurely read on the beach.

I would summarize my point as saying the author seems to be knowledgeable about Iraq and the US government but a very poor story teller.

US and British jets continue to daily pound away at Iraq, an ancient country now neatly subdivided on CNN into "fly" and "no fly" zones. Thousands of Iraqi civilians are dying of starvation, lack of medical care and so-called smart bombs that seem to go awry with a frightful regularity. Yet, Saddam Hussein's clutch on power remains as ironclad as ever. All of this is happening to the increasingly indifferent attention of the national press. Thankfully, Out of the Ashes, by Patrick and Andrew Cockburn, has arrived to set the record straight. Out of the Ashes is the kind of first-rate, fact-based reporting that we've desperately needed in order to understand what's really happening inside Iraq and how US foreign policy has made an intractable mess of a tragic situation. It gives us a rare inside look at Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War, the crippling economic sanctions, Saddam's bloody reconsolidation of power, and the continuing US/British bombing forays by reporters who have been there. Also laid bare is the behavior of the US State Department and American intelligence agencies, from the overheated saber-rattling rhetoric of Madeleine Albright to misbegotten coup attempts hatched by CIA director George Tenet. The book documents that time and again innocents, such as the Iraqi artist who was killed when a CIA-backed assassination attempt blew up a movie theater, pay the price. Out of the Ashes is both an unsparing history and a fast-paced narrative, which reads as grippingly as the best of John LeCarré.

Saddam Hussein and his sons and thier quest for nuclear supremacy is the subject of this well researched good read. With so many foolish biased books out on the subject today this book abounds with an unbiased account of the man Saddam. It includes looks inot his personal life, his childred, Uday and Qusay and also his sons in law and his bombmakers. It covers the kurds and the southern Shia muslims. A great read that is not poisened by todays Warmongering media coverage. Probably the books being written today are simply copies of this informative little read.

In the lead up to the latest Iraq war, there was no end to books and press on the weapons of mass destruction, terrorist links, and just how nasty Saddam was. In my opinion, the one area that was ignored or just not fully covered was the period of time between the two wars. This book fills a major part of that time gap. The authors give a concise and readable history of Saddam up to 1991, which is no small feat given the rather obscure political situation and tribal consideration of Middle East Politics or more accurately coup engineering. The book really focuses on three main areas, the effect of the UN economic sanctions on the general population of Iraqi, the way Saddam kept power and dealt with the Kurdish area, and the internal Saddam family relations.

The section on the sanctions is very eye opening. What is disappointing about the U.S. media is that for ten years conditions deteriorated daily in Iraq, yet the general U.S. public really did not have an idea of the conditions in Iraq. A policy that was put in place to punish and hopefully remove Saddam was in fact responsible for the misery and death of many of the population of Iraq. One can only assume that uninspired or lazy world leadership left a policy that did not work in place for so long. The one area that I would have been interested in would have been more coverage from the authors on the effect of the sanctions on the Iraqi military, but this interest is primarily driven by the events of the last year so it is not fair to ding the book for this. I also felt that at times the book dragged or became a bit dry, this is the reason I am not giving it a five star rating. Overall I enjoyed the book and found it covered new ground for me given the reading I have done over the last year on Iraq.

The 90's were a very rough decade for Iraq and a very complicated period to study. U.S. policy at the time was all over the place (Clinton should be faulted for doing a horrible job handling Iraq, and Bush '41 should be faulted for handing Clinton an impossible situation to deal with). There was the matter of the sanctions, the failed U.S.-led coup attempt, and everything that happened with the weapons inspections process.

It should be noted that this book does not cover everything from this decade in sufficient detail. However, I would consider it one of my favorite books on that particular period in Iraq. Having read just a little about Iraq at the time when I actually read this book (about 2 years ago) I found it to be very well-written and engaging. It's not an overtly scholarly book. The two authors are journalists, not political scientists, so the book comes across as a well told story. This book has been quoted by several overtly scholarly political scientists, so I believe that speaks to the quality and validity of the book. The authors tackle some controversial material without mincing words and are not afraid to describe in detail when and how the U.S. screwed up. I've found this book to be incredibly accurate on the whole and found no serious flaws in the analysis.

My only problem with the book is the authors style of citing sources. Rather than using footnotes (the easiest for reference) or endnotes (a bit more troublesome) the authors don't have any numbered citations. All citations are in the back of the book listed by page numbers in their order of appearance. This makes it difficult because there is nothing in the text of the book that indiciates a particular fact is coming from a cited source. This can be a bad thing, but again from my other readings, I do not doubt this book's factual accuracy.

Two other books that would make wonderful companions to this book for 90's-era Iraq reading would be Sarah Graham-Brown's Sanctioning Saddam (extensively analytical and academic, but wonderful to read), and Dilip Hiro's Neighbors, not Friends. These three books are about as good as you can get for the time period.