United States–Saddam Hussein relationship

The United States–Saddam Hussein relationship serves as an example of how U.S. policy could move from cooperation with a pragmatic authoritarian ruler to intervention against him, while presenting both choices through claims about political order and freedom. The book links the later overthrow of Saddam Hussein not only to the stated aim of ending Iraqi suffering but also to economic interests and a preferred model of social transformation; it argues that the intervention helped generate an opposition less open to pragmatic compromise.

The Policy Framework

The account places this relationship against a distinction Jeanne Kirkpatrick elaborated in 1979 between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. In her framework, authoritarian rulers pursued power and wealth and could be expected to respond pragmatically to material or military pressures, whereas totalitarian leaders were committed to ideology and therefore more dangerous. The distinction helped justify U.S. collaboration with right-wing dictators while supporting a harsher approach toward Communist regimes.

Saddam Hussein is presented as fitting the authoritarian category: a corrupt ruler driven by power and guided by brutal pragmatism rather than selfless ideological conviction. That characterization makes the United States’ cooperation with his government throughout the 1980s consistent with the policy framework. The relationship, in this account, was not based on shared ideals; it rested on the calculation that a ruler of this kind could be dealt with pragmatically.

From Cooperation to Intervention

The later U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein marks a sharp change in policy toward the same ruler. The book treats that shift as an instance of the practical limitations of the authoritarian-totalitarian distinction: a framework that had supported collaboration did not prevent intervention when U.S. policy turned to a different political objective. The contrast is consequential because it presents the relationship not as a steady moral opposition to Saddam’s rule, but as a change in how the United States chose to act toward it.

The intervention was legitimized as a means of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people. The book does not treat that humanitarian rationale as a complete account of the decision: it identifies oil and other political-economic interests, alongside a specific vision of the conditions that should enable Iraqi freedom. Those conditions included Western-style liberal democracy, the guarantee of private property, and integration into the global market economy.

Political Design and Its Consequences

The account questions the description of humanitarian intervention as a purely antipolitical defense of individuals against power. In the Iraqi case, it argues, a policy framed as the prevention of suffering also carried a program for how Iraqi society should be organized. By defining the desired political and economic conditions in advance, intervention could displace the possibility of Iraqis elaborating their own positive collective project of social and political transformation.

The book further judges that the principal outcome of the intervention was the emergence of a more uncompromising fundamentalist opposition, one that precluded pragmatic compromise. This consequence sharpens the contrast with the earlier policy rationale: the United States had treated Saddam Hussein as an authoritarian ruler with whom collaboration was possible because of his pragmatism, while the intervention helped produce a political opposition less amenable to such accommodation. The relationship thus illustrates the risks of translating humanitarian claims into an externally prescribed political settlement.