The nature of the beast

(Filed: 27/10/2002)

William Shawcross reviews Saddam: The Secret Life by Con Coughlin

Con Coughlin has written an extraordinary investigation into the life and rule of Saddam Hussein, one of the world’s most disgusting and dangerous dictators. It is a grand guignol portrait of a man obsessed with gaining and keeping power at any cost – to the Iraqi people, to their neighbours and to his own family; a story of murder, on a mass and a minute scale, of paranoia, rage, self-delusion – and survival.

In Coughlin’s hands Saddam appears as a brilliant and ruthless political operator who had a real presence as a young man as he manoeuvred himself up and up, killing as necessary, until he became President of Iraq in 1979. The early chapters of Coughlin’s book are especially detailed and useful on Saddam’s rise to power and, for a time, his role in building the Iraqi nation on the back of its vast oil revenues.

Once in complete control, his natural brutality took over and he became an increasingly sadistic paranoid. Coughlin shows the immense difficulty that the rest of the world has in dealing with unpredictable evil on such a grand and determined scale. Throughout the Eighties the West underestimated the dangers posed by Saddam. He was supported during his long and brutal war with Iran in the 1980s because the Iranian Ayatollahs were deemed to be a greater threat.

http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2002/10/27/bocou27 .xml&sSheet=/arts/2002/10/27/bomain.html

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