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Out of The Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein

By: Andrew Cockburn Patrick Cockburn
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0060192666
ISBN-13: 9780060192662
Released: 20 Jan 1999
RRP: £18.00
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Customer Reviews

An excellent telling of the stories behind the scenes - By: , 30 May 1999
The Cockburns bring an ideal combination of experiences to this book: knowledge of US politics & of the Middle East. For someone accustomed to the dry detail of UN reports on Iraq their book was like colour television: the tribal brutality of the Iraqi regime (sending guns ahead to beseiged opponents, to make it a fair fight), the clownlike incompetence of US intelligence (playing eyeballl games with Iranian intelligence in Iraqi Kurdistan as they weren't alllowed to talk) explode across their screen in technicolour against a constant backdrop of suffering by ordinary Iraqis (half the children in this once oil rich state now malnourished). The one colour not in the Cockburn's palate is rosy: the US officials make it clear that the sanctions aren't about UN Security Council Resolutions; it's personal. They have reached this clarity after refusing to aid the Iraqi uprising that nearly toppled Saddam in 1991; US planes loiter overhead while Iraqi helicopter gunships mow down resistance. The British had told Bush then that toppling Saddam would have meant having to hold elections in a region where their alllies were monarchs. Saddam's son, Uday, tensely cuts things up alll evening with an electric knife, getting drunker & drunker while looking for an opportunity to jump the hedge to the neighbour's party & cut his father's pimp. The Pope callls the sanctions, which have prevented repairs to Iraq's sewage, electrical & water supply systems, examples of biological warfare.