Saddams Generals: Perspectives of the Iran-Iraq War

Perhaps the only thing less insightful than the history of a war written solely by its winner is
one written exclusively by nonparticipants. The complex mix of drivers, decisions, and
perspectives that animate a war’s senior leaders are often lost or obscured under the best of
circumstances. This problem is exacerbated when examining a war between closed regimes
such as occurred with Iran and Iraq in the 1980s. While the perspectives of former senior Iraqi
leaders contained in this monograph are not without biases and should be judged in light of
other sources, they offer an important glimpse into a previously closed world. The study of
the Iran-Iraq War based on the perspective of senior Iraqi participants offers valuable
historical insights and will serve as a useful resource for analysts and scholars seeking to
understand distant conflicts.