Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition

Amazon.com
Originally written under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil and published before the Gulf War, Republic of Fear describes the rise of Saddam Hussein and the Arab Ba'th Socialist party. The author, an Iraqi expatriate now living in the United States, offers this updated edition under his real name, Kanan Makiya. A new introduction discusses events following the invasion of Kuwait ("the chamber of horrors that is Saddam Hussein's Iraq has grown into something that not even the most morbid imagination could have dreamed up"). The book is not merely a chronicle of recent Iraqi politics, but a discussion of why the country has evolved into "a Kafkaesque world ... one ruled and held together by fear." Essential reading for anybody who wants to understand modern Iraq. --John J. Miller


From Library Journal
The author, an Iraqi expatriate writing under an assumed name, has painted a bleak and forbidding landscape of Iraq--past, present, and future. He painstakingly lays out the labyrinthine history of the chronologies, players, and actions of the Ba'th party and Iraq from 1958 to 1980. However, despite its thoroughness, this book is not objective; in the prefatory note, al-Khalil states "my prejudices . . . give rise to a particular interpretation of Iraqi Ba'thism." While his bias may be somewhat borne out, the author unfortunately writes more from conviction than from impartial observation. Nonetheless, this is highly recommended for all major collections in large public and academic libraries.- David P. Snider, Casa Grande P.L., Ariz.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


London Sunday Telegraph
"Republic of Fear should be essential reading for all politicians, soldiers and international officials dealing with the current crisis in the Gulf."


Times Literary Supplement
"A sophisticated and brilliantly savage denunciation of Arab populist politics, a politics of hate, lies, fantasy, brutality and despair. . . . Al- Khalil shows . . . the way in which nationalist, Ba'thist ideology has developed and been employed in the service of State terror."


Review
"[Makiya's] demolition of the monstrous aberration of the Ba'th is masterly. He shows the importance of the obsessive fabrication of 'enemies,' and the tortuous logic that compels Saddam Hussein to maintain a state of perpetual alert against the enemies of Arabism both within and without."--Peter Sluglett, Times Literary Supplement


Book Description
First published in 1989, just before the Gulf War broke out, Republic of Fear was the only book that explained the motives of the Saddam Hussein regime in invading and annexing Kuwait. This edition, updated in 1998, has a substantial introduction focusing on the changes in Hussein's regime since the Gulf War.

In 1968 a coup d'etat brought into power an extraordinary regime in Iraq, one that stood apart from other regimes in the Middle East. Between 1968 and 1980, this new regime, headed by the Arab Ba'th Socialist party, used ruthless repression and relentless organization to transform the way Iraqis think and react to political questions. In just twelve years, a party of a few thousand people grew to include nearly ten percent of the Iraqi population.

This book describes the experience of Ba'thism from 1968 to 1980 and analyzes the kind of political authority it engendered, culminating in the personality cult around Saddam Hussein. Fear, the author argues, is at the heart of Ba'thi politics and has become the cement for a genuine authority, however bizarre.

Examining Iraqi history in a search for clues to understanding contemporary political affairs, the author illustrates how the quality of Ba'thi pan-Arabism as an ideology, the centrality of the first experience of pan-Arabism in Iraq, and the interaction between the Ba'th and communist parties in Iraq from 1958 to 1968 were crucial in shaping the current regime.

FROM THE PUBLISHER