This combined work of a journalist for The New York Times and a Harvard scholar is neither a biography of Saddam nor a history of Iraq but has elements of both and serves the purpose of giving the general reader a broad and fairly solid background for understanding the crisis in the gulf. There is a bit of everything here on the Middle East-Saddam's record of violence, the Iran-Iraq War, the oil industry, terrorism, Iraq's use of poison gas and the significance of Kuwait, topped off with a critique of American policy-all put together with some signs of haste.