Colin Freeman on Iraq

James Hider’s book, The Spiders of Allah, has been criticised for being “macho” and I was wondering whether you think that’s a fair criticism?

No I don’t. Obviously the book deals with war and its horrors – car bombs and so forth, but it’s not written in a remotely macho way. There are two things that I like about this book. Firstly, the description of the places and the vividness of the writing is very good. As someone who has been to some of the places he describes and done similar things, I feel that he really brings it to life. And I also like that he was in Iraq for almost three years, which is longer than I was there. Very few people spent anything like that amount of time in the country, so Hider has a perspective that not many other people have.

This may sound a bit like special pleading, but there is occasionally a bit of sniffiness about reporters writing books about their time in a war zone. People think, “Oh it’s just another journo’s memoirs.” But in Hider’s case, and certainly in the case of Iraq generally, it’s true to say that, in terms of providing a westerner’s perspective, journalists were among the very few people who saw what was going on in Iraq from all sides. If you were with the military or the civilian administration you weren’t really allowed out of the Green Zones to see things for yourself. This was because of security concerns - it wasn’t that others weren’t prepared to take those risks. It’s just the way it was. So by talking to people from all walks of life and chronicling what was going on, I think Hider has done a very good job. He brings a whole country to life.

And, more importantly, it’s written in a very entertaining style and it’s very readable. A mistake that a lot of journalists make when writing a book is that they simply chronicle what’s going on without paying sufficient attention to whether it’s readable or not, and they end up with something that reads like an academic text. Which is fine, but it might not encourage a lot of people to read it.

Your second book, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession, by the brothers Patrick and Andrew Cockburn, is not a biography of Saddam himself, is it?

I would describe it as a biography of the events of the 1990s. It describes a lot about what went on in Saddam’s regime, and very artfully weaves in some reportage that the authors have done themselves. One scene in particular stands out in my mind – when they meet one of Saddam’s sons in a nightclub.

There are also some very good accounts of what Iraq was like during the UN sanctions, when life for Iraqis became very difficult. But what you have to remember with this book and all those written in Saddam’s time is that reliable and accurate information is very hard to come by. To try to make sense of it is very admirable.

And what is also interesting are the descriptions of how people tried to lead military coups against Saddam using members of the Iraqi opposition, mostly from northern Iraq. It shows just how difficult it was to lead those coups and how formidable Saddam’s intelligence apparatus was. With every single unsuccessful attempt, all the inside agents would be arrested, and so the number of people who knew what was going on became ever smaller. When you read this book you realise that the option of launching a coup, which is something that a lot of people used to talk about, as if to say, “Why didn’t we do that rather than invade?”, was because it was actually hard. It had been attempted numerous times and no one had managed it.

To a certain extent the book is dated, but it’s still a good book for providing an idea of the intrigue involved in the CIA-led plots against him and the unreliability of the people the CIA put their hopes in. This is a useful lesson to take away and apply to any country where you think the Americans might be trying to destabilise things. It shows that it’s not an exact science and that often the CIA are not the all-powerful outfit you might expect.

Con Coughlin’s book, Saddam: The Secret Life, portrays a monster comparable to Stalin. How striking did you find the similarity?

Saddam expressed his admiration for Stalin on numerous occasions and describes him as not being a communist but a nationalist. And I think Saddam was trained by the KGB, which accounts in part for why he was able to run his country so brutally.

His book came out shortly before the war began and it was arguably one of the best-timed biographies of the century. If you were in Baghdad you would see all manner of people carrying copies of it. The American soldiers had it, the foreign civilian officials working with the US administration had it, all the journalists had it, and quite a lot of Iraqis were interested in getting copies.

It’s a fairly even-handed account of the history of Iraq from Saddam’s time onward.