The Cold War gave totalitarianism a bad name, in more than one respect. It was used to characterize the communist other, suggesting that it was a continuation, albeit under different flags, of the fascist impulse and thus the antithesis of the West's image of itself. It also came to be used in political science not merely to describe but also to explain the political regimes of countries dominated by one party, one ideology and one leader. There were plenty of these around in the postcolonial world, and the term was freely bandied about, generally applied to regimes that were repulsive to liberal sensibilities and that happened to be allies of the USSR or of China. Of course, there were also Western-allied states that looked remarkably similar and this led to a good deal of casuistry on the part of Western leaders when trying to explain why one dictatorship was an appalling totalitarian tyranny, whereas the other was an authoritarian force for stability.

Curiously, Iraq under the Baʿth party, and especially under the rule of Saddam Hussein was the dubious beneficiary of both of these labels. When it was allied to the USSR or, after the Cold War, when it was seen as a “pariah state”, the system was described as “totalitarian”. However, when it seemed to be more amenable to – and dependent on – the support of the West and its regional allies the regime was in a sense downgraded to merely “authoritarian”. Achim Rohde's thoughtful study of Iraq under the Baʿthist regime provides a bracing and sharply critical examination of the uses and abuses of these terms, particularly that of “totalitarianism”, both in a general sense and in relation to Iraq.

As he rightly points out, one of the debilitating effects of such a characterization of the Iraqi polity was that it produced a thin and wholly unconvincing account of the complex political society that existed in the country. In part, this was because it focused all attention on the person of Saddam Hussein, or on the narrow circles he gathered around himself. Ironically, it also appeared to accept uncritically the public account that the regime and the Baʿth Party gave of themselves. In many respects, the image of totalizing power, ubiquitous and unrelenting, penetrating all levels of society and marshalling all sectors to serve the cause as defined by the “leader necessity” was the perennial fantasy of Saddam Hussein and his coterie. Of course, they knew better than anyone else how far this was from the reality of power in Iraq, where institutions, whether of party or state, went through the motions, but were deeply compromised in terms of their cohesion and purpose. Nor was this simply due to the stresses of war in the 1980s or the depredations of sanctions in the 1990s.

Rohde's strategy for seeking to challenge these totalizing views and claims about the nature of the Iraqi state is to revive interest in spaces where a diverse social and intellectual life existed that was by no means under the complete control of Saddam Hussein or the Baʿth Party under his personal direction. He devotes a substantial chapter to the role of women and, more generally, to questions of gender and their place in Baʿthist Iraq. In doing so, he argues convincingly that there is considerable evidence for individual and collective agency on the part of Iraqi men and women seeking constantly to renegotiate, as in any political system, the boundaries of the public and the private, the line between state regulation and social self-determination.

Rohde accords much the same treatment to artistic and cultural production under the rule of Baʿth. Part of this is indeed devoted to the “art of the dictator” and the ways in which visual, plastic and literary artists were co-opted into the regime's idea of what inspirational or mobilizing art should be about. Even here there were clearly mixed messages, caused in part by the changeable purposes of different sections of the party and state machine, in part by the fact that artistic production was much more of a two-way process than the totalitarian image would suggest. In addition, there were artists who adopted any number of strategies to retain their integrity whilst avoiding forceful interference by state authorities. As with gender issues, artists’ strategies for maintaining a sometimes troubling and often fragile line between personal expression and state demands, were facets of the more general and constant negotiation and re-negotiation of power that was as active under Baʿthist rule in Iraq as it was before and has been since.

These are the most successful parts of the book. They make an original contribution to the debate about the nature of political society in Iraq. They also dismantle the unhelpful “totalitarian” framework through which so many of the cheerleaders for the US invasion and occupation of 2003 chose to see the Iraq of Saddam Hussein – with such disastrous results. In this account, Rohde has made good use not only of the secondary literature, but also of the publications of Baʿthist-era Iraq. However, he has not had the opportunity to use the mountain of captured Iraqi documents now deposited at the National Defense University in the United States. As scholars begin to mine this extraordinary resource from the very heart of the Baʿthist regime, it will be interesting to see how far their findings may reinforce the arguments which Rohde so skilfully develops in this book.