This excellent book looks at the Ba'ath regime in Iraq, the secret police organizations in that country and the cult of personality that surrounded Saddam Hussein. Joseph Sassoon looks at Iraq as a totalitarian state and uses information gleaned from the fascist regime's own internal records to illustrate it. Saddam's social control over Iraq and the mechanisms employed to maintain it would be familiar to any student of Germany's Hitler or the USSR's Stalin: monitoring of the citizenry, medals and other perks to supporters of the state, utilization of informants, hero worship of the head of state, ruthless punishment of dissidents and corruption of the rank-and-file (i.e., making them participants in the crimes of the party). Illustrated with photos of some party documents.
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