OVERVIEW

Sir Michael Howard, the great British military historian, once warned that “the past is a foreign country; there is very little we can say about it until we have learned the language and understood its assumptions.” A recurring insight when reviewing transcripts of discussions between Saddam and members of his inner circle is the extent to which the West’s failure to understand this opaque regime were as much a failure of Westerners to understand their own assumptions as they were a deficit of fact. Extrapolating from Howard’s quote, one could say that to Western policy makers, totalitarian regimes may be the most exotic of all foreign countries. The inglorious demise of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime might provide insights to the kind of thinking that emerges from the innermost regions of totalitarianism and a guidebook to improving assumptions of the “other”.