Review Khidhir Hamza, Saddam’s Bombmaker, The Terrifying Inside Story Of The Iraqi Nuclear And Biological Weapons Agenda, Scribner, 2000

  

Before the 2003 invasion Khidhir Hamza was one of the leading Iraqis in America warning of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and advocating for war. He regularly appeared in the media. In 2001 he told PBS’s Frontline that Iraq only needed a nuclear core to build an atomic bomb. In 2002 he gave a presentation to the Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. He told the latter that Iraq had enough uranium to build three bombs by 2005 if it was enriched. At the end of that year his claims were used in a speech by President George Bush as part of the public relations campaign to win support for the invasion. His story was first published in 2000 in Saddam’s Bombmaker, The Terrifying Inside Story Of The Iraqi Nuclear And Biological Weapons Agenda. He turned out to be a fraud.

Review George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, My Years at the CIA, Harper Collins, 2007

  

George Tenet was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Presidents Clinton and Bush. He eventually resigned because of the controversy over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. His book At The Center of the Storm is very interesting because it shows that he was very sensitive about his time at the Agency with several chapters responding to criticisms of his tenure.

Review Edited by Paul Cornish, The Conflict In Iraq, 2003, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

  

The Conflict In Iraq is an anthology with chapters by various authors connected to the Center for Defense Studies at King’s College London. Like any collection some of the chapters are quite good and others are not. The fact that the book was put together very early in the U.S. occupation of Iraq also makes some of the readings outdated. Still there are some important insights provided such as comparisons between the British and Americans times in Iraq, the war planning, and United Nations weapons inspections.

Review Tim Trevan, Saddam’s Secrets: The Hunt For Iraq’s Hidden Weapons, Harper Collins, 1999

  

Tim Trevan was a British expert in weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In 1992 he joined the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspectors in Iraq. His Saddam’s Secrets is one of the better books on the subject. He goes into great detail about all of the jobs the inspectors carried out but focuses upon the biological weapons program which Iraq tried to hide. It’s the coverage of each inspection team that went to Iraq that reveals how Baghdad lied about its program until UNSCOM ended in 1998.

Vice President Cheney’s Role In The Iraq War

 

Almost the entire senior leadership of President Bush’s national security team was for regime change in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney was out in front making accusations against Saddam Hussein to justify the invasion. Since he recently passed here is a review of his role in the lead up to the Iraq War.

Review Georges Sada with Jim Nelson Black, Saddam’s Secrets, How An Iraqi General Defied And Survived Saddam Hussein, Thomas Nelson, 2006

Sada, Georges with Black, Jim Nelson, Saddam’s Secrets, How An Iraqi General Defied And Survived Saddam Hussein, Thomas Nelson, 2006

 

Georges Sada was an Assyrian Christian who rose to the top echelons of the Iraqi Air Force under Saddam Hussein. After the 2003 invasion he became an advisor to the Iraqi government. He co-wrote Saddam’s Secrets, How An Iraqi General Defied And Survived Saddam Hussein to tell his story. Unfortunately he tried to include two sensational stories to sell books in the West and one about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is pure fiction.

Review Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq, Pantheon, 2004

Blix, Hans, Disarming Iraq, Pantheon, 2004

 

President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair justified their invasion of Iraq based upon the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction. They quoted United Nations weapons inspections in the 1990s which found a vast program to build chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. When inspectors returned to Iraq in 2002 however their work was largely criticized by the U.S. and UK because they didn’t support those countries’ claims against Saddam. Hans Blix was a chief inspector during both regimes and wrote Disarming Iraq to express his perspective on what happened. His book is an argument for the work of the United Nations inspectors and against the actions of both Iraq and the United States.

Review Imad Khadduri, Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage, Memoirs And Delusions, Springhead Publishers, 2003

Khadduri, Imad, Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage, Memoirs And Delusions, Springhead Publishers, 2003

 

Imad Khadduri worked on Iraq’s nuclear program amongst other government duties. His Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage is a memoir of his life in Iraq and eventual escape to Canada.

Review Raid On The Sun, Inside Israel’s Secret Campaign That Denied Saddam The Bomb

Claire, Rodger, Raid On The Sun, Inside Israel’s Secret Campaign That Denied Saddam The Bomb, Broadway Books, 2004

 

Rodger Claire’s Raid on The Sun, Inside Israel’s Secret Campaign That Denied Saddam The Bomb is about the 1981 raid upon Iraq’s nuclear reactor. The government of PM Menachem Begin was convinced that Iraq was only a few years away from getting a nuclear bomb and decided to stop the program with an air strike. The author mainly focuses upon the Israeli decision making and then the pilots. Unfortunately the author relied upon an Iraqi defector for much of the information about Iraq’s program and was misled as a result.

Review Britain’s 2 Wars With Iraq 1941 1991

El-Solh, Raghid, Britain’s 2 Wars With Iraq 1941 1991, Garnet Publishing Limited, 1996

 

Raghid El-Solh’s Britain’s 2 Wars With Iraq 1941 1991 is a tale of two halves. It covers the Anglo-Iraq War which was part of the larger World War 2 conflict as well as the Gulf War. The author argues that England has historically attempted to maintain the status quo in the Middle East which came into conflict with various Iraqi leaders. The coverage of first war is quite good while the section on the Gulf War reads like Saddam era propaganda.

Review Unrevealed Milestones in the Iraqi National Nuclear Program 1981-1991

Selbi, Dhafir, Al-Chalabi, Zuhair, Co-authored and edited by Dr. Khadduri, Imad, Unrevealed Milestones in the Iraqi National Nuclear Program 1981-1991, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011

 

Unrevealed Milestones in the Iraqi National Nuclear Program 1981-1991 was written by three Iraqi scientists who worked on the country’s nuclear program. They were partly inspired by two other scientists who wrote books which the authors believed were full of misinformation aimed at supporting the U.S. claims about WMD. Their intent was to tell their truth of what Iraq did and didn’t do which of course was a huge topic of controversy before and after the 2003 invasion.

Review The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America’s Invasion Of Iraq

Coll, Steve, The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America’s Invasion Of Iraq, Penguin Press, 2024

 

Twenty years after the Iraq invasion a comprehensive book including both the US and Iraqi perspectives on what led to the conflict has finally been published. That’s thanks to Steve Coll and his The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America’s Invasion Of Iraq. The author traces U.S.-Iraq relations from the Iran-Iraq War to the 2000s to show how the two countries constantly misread each other leading to false assumptions and the eventual overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Review Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein

Nixon, John, Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016

 

John Nixon was part of a CIA team that was the first to debrief Saddam Hussein after his capture in December 2003. In Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein Nixon writes about what kind of person Saddam was, the issues he had with interviewing him, the range of topics they covered and then his criticism of how the Agency and the Bush administration dealt with the Iraq War. Nixon has a very easy writing style allowing the reader to quickly go through and digest the book. His main thesis was that the United States completely misunderstood Saddam which was part of a larger problem of never comprehending Iraq.

Review The Secret History Of The Iraq War

Bodansky, Yossef, The Secret History Of The Iraq War, New York: 10 Regan Books, 2005

 

This book sat in the discount bin of a local bookstore for what seemed like forever. Reading the first few pages it’s immediately understandable why it was there. It claimed that Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship with Al Qaeda starting in the 1990s when Iraq gave military aid to Somali jihadists led by Aymenn al-Zawahiri which escalated by the early 2000s when Baghdad gave Osama bin Laden WMD. The former was based upon the false story that Al Qaeda helped Somalis during the Black Hawk Down incident. The rest is just pure fantasy. That gives you a glimpse into the world of The Secret History Of The Iraq War by Yossef Bodansky. It reads like a QAnon history of the Iraq War full of outlandish conspiracy theories.

Review Spider’s Web, The secret history of how the White House illegally armed Iraq

Friedman, Alan, Spider’s Web, The secret history of how the White House illegally armed Iraq, New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books, 1993

 

Spider’s Web, The secret history of how the White House illegally armed Iraq by Financial Times journalist Alan Friedman is about a story that is largely forgotten today. During the Iran-Iraq War the U.S. decided to support Baghdad to stop the Iranian Revolutionary from spreading. That included helping foreign companies ship weapons to Iraq and offering credit to Baghdad some of which was diverted to buying technology for Saddam’s WMD, nuclear and missile programs. When Iraq invaded Kuwait the Bush administration attempted to cover up the entire affair which is the topic of Friedman’s book why and how did the two presidents back Iraq and then try to deny the whole affair.

Review The Threatening Storm, The United States and Iraq: the crisis, the strategy, and the prospects after Saddam

Pollack, Kenneth, The Threatening Storm, The United States and Iraq: the crisis, the strategy, and the prospects after Saddam, New York: Random House, 2002

 

The Iraq War is blamed upon the Republicans but that ignores the fact that there were many Democrats who were also for regime change as well. Kenneth Pollak a former CIA analyst and member of the National Security Council was in that camp. He wrote The Threatening Storm, The United States and Iraq: the crisis, the strategy, and the prospects after Saddam arguing that Saddam Hussein was the greatest foreign threat to the United States and an invasion was the only solution.

Review War and Decision, Inside The Pentagon At The Dawn Of The War On Terrorism

Feith, Douglas, War and Decision, Inside The Pentagon At The Dawn Of The War On Terrorism, New York: Harper Collins, 2008

 

Douglas Feith was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the Bush administration. War and Decision, Inside The Pentagon At The Dawn Of The War On Terrorism is his attempt to answer the critics of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. His problem was that he tried to make this argument using what was known in 2008 when the justifications for war had been disproven. He twists and turns events and omits others to try to say that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States while blaming the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and Paul Bremer for everything that went wrong. War and Decision is an amazing example of verbal gymnastics but ironically exposes many of the problems with the Iraq War.

Review Iraq Confidential, The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein

Ritter, Scott, Iraq Confidential, The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein, New York: Nation Books, 2005

 

Iraq Confidential, The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein was former U.N. inspector Scott Ritter’s second book on his experiences working in Iraq. He claimed the United States undermined the inspection process from the start not supporting it, trying to manipulate it, and ultimately giving up on it. The problem is much of his story contradicts what he wrote in his first book Endgame, Solving The Iraq Crisis. That begs the question of which version is the reader supposed to believe?

Review Endgame, Solving The Iraq Crisis

Ritter, Scott, Endgame, Solving The Iraq Crisis, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002

 

Endgame, Solving The Iraq Crisis was Scott Ritter venting his frustration with the United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq in the 1990s. Ritter was one of the chief inspectors and believed that the United States gave up on the process and allowed Iraq to hide its weapons of mass destruction. A few years later however he completely flipped around his perspective questioning the Bush administration’s argument to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Review Hide And Seek, The Search For Truth In Iraq

Duelfer, Charles, Hide And Seek, The Search For Truth In Iraq, New York: Public Affairs, 2009

 

Charles Duelfer was the deputy head of the United Nations inspectors in the 1990s and then in charge of the Iraq Survey Group which investigated Iraq’s WMD programs after the 2003 invasion. His book Hide And Seek, The Search For Truth In Iraq is about those two experiences plus his work with the CIA in between them. He made three main points. One was that the weapons inspections in the 1990s and 2000s were never going to get to the bottom of things because Iraq would never cooperate with something imposed upon it. The second was that he supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein but then acknowledged that the Bush administration destroyed Iraq afterward. Third he tried to explain why Iraq wanted WMD and acted like it still had them after they were destroyed. Ultimately his goal was to explain what both the U.S. and Iraqis were thinking during their years of confrontation when almost all books are just about the Americans.