Cynicism, incompetence, barbarity and betrayal

Two months after the failed March 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein, the Ministry of Information in Baghdad announced that foreign journalists could travel freely inside Iraq. And so I headed south, to the Shiite holy cities. In Kerbala, Republican Guards sat lazily smoking cigarettes and drinking tea in the battered shrine to Imam Hussein - which they had used for target practice. Outside the mosque, I watched a woman in a black chador pick her way through acres of rubble, tears streaming down her face. In Najaf, I went to the home of Grand Ayatollah al-Khoie, whose son begged me in fearful whispers to go away. The Ayatollah and his son had been summoned to Baghdad during the rebellion, for an angry dressing down by Saddam. Later I learned that 102 of alKhoie's followers had disappeared forever in his absence, a fact recalled in this gripping book by the Cockburn brothers Andrew and Patrick.

In the aftermath of the Gulf War, western diplomats and journalists predicted Saddam's imminent downfall. As usual, they got it wrong. It was enough to see the swaggering confidence of the Republican Guards and the military governors of Basra, Kut and Amara - and the fear in the eyes of civilians - to realise that Saddam was there to stay.

The Cockburns' book is a chilling tale of barbarity and betrayal. It documents the lethal mix of US cynicism and incompetence that established Saddam as the bully of the Gulf, encouraged him to invade Iran and Kuwait, and then allowed him to stay in power. As the Gulf War drew to a close, President Bush twice called on "the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." The Kurds and Shiites rose up. At the height of their rebellion, Saddam lost control of 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces.

But US officials refused to talk to the rebels, and US troops in southern Iraq stopped them taking the guns and ammunition they needed from Iraqi army barracks. As the Cockburns make clear, the allies did not want to overthrow Saddam Hussein. "No one wanted to encourage democracy in Iraq," the authors write. "It might prove catching. It had been a conservative war to keep the Middle East as it was, not to introduce change."

Thousands of Iraqis were nonetheless foolish enough to participate in subsequent CIA plotting. The US intelligence agency backed the rival opposition groups Iraqi National Accord and Iraqi National Congress - led by a convicted embezzler - to the tune of $100 million. A failed INA coup in June 1996 resulted in the deaths of up to 800 opponents in Baghdad. Their CIA handlers in Amman ran away. Also in 1996, the US stood by while Saddam reconquered much of Kurdistan. Again, the CIA ran away, this time from their headquarters in the Kurdish town of Salahudin.

The book provides vivid descriptions of the regime's cruelty. When Saddam's sons-in-law returned after defecting to Jordan, they were murdered and dragged away with meat hooks through their eyes. The authors recount an unforgettable meeting with the dictator's hard-drinking, violent and sex-crazed son Uday in a Baghdad restaurant. Later, they interviewed an Iraqi who severely wounded Uday in an attempted assassination.

For all the atrocities committed by Saddam and his family, the most shocking behaviour is that of the US government. UN sanctions were supposed to be lifted once Iraq was disarmed. But from the outset, Washington said sanctions would stay in place and "Iraqis will pay the price" as long as Saddam was in power. The US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was asked in 1996 how sanctions could be justified when they were believed to have caused the deaths of more than half a million children - more than died in Hiroshima. "We think the price is worth it," she replied. By 1998, Pope John Paul II quoted UN reports that more than one million civilians had died as a direct result of sanctions. As the Cockburns point out, "This is far higher than the death toll from the Gulf War and indeed approaches the benchmark for modern holocausts set in Rwanda and Cambodia."

Lara Marlowe is Paris correspondent for The Irish Times. She covered the 1991 Gulf War and reported from Iraq during the 1990s