The Institute for Defense Analyses prepared the original version of this book for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, under task order AJ-8-2826, the Conflict Records Research Center. The study addresses the task objective of drawing lessons from captured Iraqi records and making information in the captured materials available to the scholarly community. The original study, and the larger body of captured recordings on which it rests, was designed to provide researchers with important insights into the inner workings of the regime of Saddam Hussein and, it is hoped, the nature of authoritarian regimes more generally.

Analysts will benefit for years to come from reviewing copies of the captured records at the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), which recently opened its doors at the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies, in Washington, DC. Saddam's regime is gone forever, yet important insights will emerge, and understandings evolve, as a new generation of students and scholars cuts its teeth on these fascinating records. Lessons derived from the captured records will also be of considerable import to policymakers, because conventional understandings about how Saddam's regime operated continue to influence expectations about events in and outside of Iraq. As William Faulkner once observed, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”