Description: Explores the US government's covert relations with the Iraqi Ba'th Party as it brutalised Iraqi communists.
Brief description: Weldon C. Matthews is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Oakland University
Review Quotes: 'Decades after the US toppled Saddam Hussein, Matthews illuminates the 1960s origins of Ba'thist rule. Using new Arabic and Central Intelligence Agency sources, he shows how para-state militias intensified a Ba'thist-Communist struggle to mobilise Iraqis and define postcolonial liberation. This long-awaited study confronts Iraq's experience with American imperialism, anticolonialism and political violence.'--Nathan Citino, Rice University