INTRODUCTION

Citizens of few countries have experienced a recent political history as calamitous as that suffered by Iraqis. In the 1970s, Iraq was a middle-income country with a significant and growing class of educated and cosmopolitan elites. Endowed with both oil and water resources, Iraq was on a path to economic modernization, particularly in the years following the 1973 surge in the price of petroleum. Increasing Iraqi oil rents paralleled the rise of an ambitious, yet ruthless, political leader, and the relative prosperity of the 1970s was disrupted by war and repression. The pain of political oppression was compounded by crippling economic sanctions followed by foreign occupation and the violent unfolding of a sectarian civil war. During this time, Iraq became a destination and breeding ground for Islamic extremists.

The Iraqi state that emerged from this trauma has struggled to reestablish territorial integrity. Its governance structures are fragile and prone to sectarian favoritism. In 2006, then-Senator Joseph Biden suggested that an Iraq of autonomous regions split along ethnic lines might bring an end to the civil war. More than ten years later, US policymakers continue to debate whether a unified Iraq will ever again be governable. This project explores the conditions that led to the breakdown of the Iraqi state through an examination of Iraqi political life during Saddam Hussein's time in power.

There is little doubt that the recent history of political trauma Iraq has experienced has its roots in the Ba'th Party's governance. Yet understanding how and why nation-building failed in Iraq has been challenging, at least in part, because of difficulties observing the inner workings of autocratic governance structures. The internal workings of a dictatorship are often described as taking place within a "black box" — while some of the input and output characteristics are known, the inner dynamics of how power coalesces and is maintained remains opaque. And because collecting information in a nondemocratic setting is so challenging, relatively little scholarship has sought to explain the mechanics of autocratic control in the world's most repressive regimes. It is virtually impossible to study the internal politics of such regimes while the dictator is in power. Even after regimes have been overthrown, new holders of political power may have an incentive to hide information about the repressive and control apparatuses due to the political implications of exposing the often widespread nature of societal complicity with the ancien régime. And although the existing literature on non-democracies has grown tremendously in the last twenty years, it tends to be sparse when compared to scholarly work that seeks to explain political life in democracies.

Despite these barriers, determining the specificities of everyday political life in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era has become possible as a result of the recent availability of millions of documents recovered following two pivotal events — the establishment of Kurdish self-rule in northern Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Uprisings and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Ba'thist regime in 2003. The first cache of government documents was salvaged following large-scale popular demonstrations that took place following the Iraqi military withdrawal from Kuwait. This collection — known as the Iraqi Secret Police Files — is housed at the University of Colorado Boulder. These files provide detailed information about Ba'th Party and government operations in northern Iraq leading up to 1991. At the time of my visit to this archive in December 2013 to January 2014, I was the only researcher to have visited the collection.

The second cache of government documents is composed of two collections that were captured during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The first collection consists of the tapes and associated transcripts of conversations between Saddam Hussein and various advisors and underlings. Until recently this collection, which is no longer available to the public, was housed at the Conflict Records Research Center at the National Defense University. The second collection consists of documents assembled by the Iraq Memory Foundation. The Hoover Institution acquired the Iraq Memory Foundation collection in 2008, and these files became available for scholarly research in 2010. The documents in this second collection include both print and video materials which provide a rich picture of the everyday practices of Iraq's highly repressive autocracy.

Reliance on collections of Iraqi government documents no doubt allows for only a partial, incomplete picture of political life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Another important source of information comes from the first-hand testimony of Iraqis. Between 2003 and 2008, documentary filmmakers associated with the Iraq Memory Foundation recorded the experiences of 190 individuals who lived through Ba'thist rule as part of an oral history project. These testimonials aired on al-'lraqiyya — an Arabic-language satellite and terrestrial public television network in Iraq that serves 85 percent of the country's population. I include the firsthand testimony of individuals interviewed for this project at various points in the book.

Using data from these three collections, as well as material from a vast secondary source literature on Iraqi politics and history, I have sought answers to a series of foundational questions related to autocratic governance in Iraq. What did the Ba'thist regime actually know about its citizens? Why did it use blunt, seemingly suboptimal, forms of punishment against its population? And what explains variation in the types of compliance and resistance behaviors undertaken by Iraqis during Hussein's dictatorship?

While some of my findings affirm a conventional narrative about citizen behavior in autocratic Iraq, in other cases the archival evidence demands we update the accepted wisdom about Iraqi political life. I find that, despite pretensions to political hegemony, the Iraqi regime frequently lacked important information about its population, and this problem of intelligence gathering varied in magnitude across ethnic, religious, and communal groups within Iraq. When rebellious behaviors occurred, inadequate information about the specific identity of the perpetrators led the regime to engage in forms of collective punishment that reinforced and cemented identity cleavages precisely among those groups about which the regime was least informed....