A British journalist's portrait of Saddam Hussein, his regime and his thrust for a dominant role in the Arab world. Henderson's investigations have turned up some interesting facts, especially on Iraq's obsessive search for all manner of advanced weaponry (e.g., the enormous supergun), but the book is not the most substantial of the recent studies of Iraq in the Saddam Hussein era. One point: the author maintains that Farzad Bazoft, the journalist executed by the Iraqi government in 1990, really was a British spy.