A Middle East Reader [antikvár]

Edward Mortimer The Thief of Baghdad Saddam Hussein: A Biography by Fuad Matar. Highlight, 286 pp., L12.95 Iraqi Power and US Security in the Middle East by Stephen C. Pelletiere, Douglas V. Johnson II, and Leif R. Rosenberger. Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 95 pp., free Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq by Samir al-Khalil. University of California Press, 310 pp., $25.00; Pantheon $12.95 (paper) Hvunan Bights in Iraq by Middle East Watch. Human Rights Watch/ Yale University Press, 160 pp., $19.95 The publications under review about the regime of Saddam Hussein have at least one thing in common: they were all written before August 2, 1990. None of the authors had foreknowledge that, in the small hours of that day, the armed forces of Iraq would invade and occupy the entire territory of the state of Kuwait. The present reviewer, writing four weeks after that event, has a strong sense that the world before it happened was a different place; but he equally has no foreknowledge of other events, perhaps no less dramatic and even more momentous, that may have occurred before these words find their way into the hands of the reader. For a writer, such an event has the effect of raising the stakes. On the one hand, it attracts public attention to his subject, thereby possibly bringing him a much larger readership.