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. On the other, it subjects his work to a harsh, perhaps unfair test: it will be judged by the light it throws, or fails to throw, on an event he could not know of while he was writing it. At worst, he may have exposed himself to ridicule by selective quotation.
Such is the case of Fuad Matar, a wellknown Lebanese journalist who produced a quasi-official biography of the Iraqi president in 1981. This has now been reissued in a â??1990 edition,â? in fact unchanged except for a glossy dust jacket on which the authorâ??s name is spelled wrong, and a preface in which, after claiming that all but one of the predictions in the early edition have come true (the exception being the Non-Aligned Summit, which was not held in Baghdad in 1982), Matar proceeds to assert â??the right of the new Arab generation to read about Saddam Hussein now, especially after guns have become silent and doves fly with the olive branch of peace above the region.â?
Read Full Article »