Lisa Blaydes and Samuel Helfont eds., "Ba‘thist Iraq Through Archives: Reflections, Explorations, and Opportunities" (Stanford UP, 2026) - New Books Network

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[00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
[00:05]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased to welcome back onto the podcast Dr. Samuel Helfont, to tell us about a latest book that he has co edited with Dr. Lisa blades and was published by Stanford University Press in 2026, titled Ba' Athist Iraq through the Reflections and Explorations and Opportunities, which as the title suggests, takes us, well, to some extent through the actual archives, but also through many different ways people have had of looking at the archives, which have now been available for research for a while now. And so we can actually kind of come to some conclusions sort of about what is there, what's not there, what is it like to look through the archives, what does it kind of require us or allow us to rethink or add nuance to? So it's a really interesting exploration of kind of lots of things. Obviously we're going to talk about Iraqi politics. Right. But also questions of historiography. What is an archive? Who gets to make those kinds of decisions? Who gets to investigate an archive? There's a lot wrapped up in this book. So, Samuel, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
[01:19]
A
Thanks for having me again.
[01:21]
B
Well, thank you for coming back. But for listeners who perhaps have not heard your previous interviews with me, could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and then tell us a bit about your co editor as well and the origins of this project.
[01:33]
A
Okay, yeah. Great. So my name is Samuel Helfont. I am an associate professor of Strategy and Policy in the Naval War College Program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. And my co editor who asked me to come on behalf of both of us, she is Lisa Blades and she is a professor of Political science at Stanford University. So the origins of this project were that we had both been working on these records for some time and we had both been working on them from the very early years that they were available. And as 2023 approached, two things were, were happening at the same time. First, it was the, the 10 year anniversary or the 20 year anniversary, excuse me, of the, of the Iraq War. So there was some interest in, you know, these records again. And there had been about a decade's worth of scholarship on these records. And so we, we thought, you know, there's been a lot written on them now. They were really new and, and, and they're still interesting. But after a decade, you know, we felt that it was worth taking A step back and looking at what people have done, what they haven't done, what they could do, some of the issues that. That might be involved in researching these. These records. So, you know, a few of these things came together just at. At the right time, and Lisa and I decided to. To put this project together.
[03:12]
B
Okay. That is a very helpful introduction to the project and gives us a sense of kind of the timeline we're talking about here for these archives. But can you give us more kind of background about them? I mean, how big are they? What sorts of things are in them? What. What are these archives?
[03:27]
A
Yes. So they're very large. There's several sets of these archives. They're both at the Hoover Institution Library archives today. And which I should admit this. I should state that these are, you know, this is part of the Hoover series at Stanford. And we received enormous help from the library and archives. The archivist there, the staff, the director, all were very generous with their time and money to help make this project come to being. So I should always mention that. And it's a great place to work for anyone who wants to go there. Just a quick plug, but. So there's two sets of records there right now that are the main sets. The first is the Bath Party records, which are the sort of main set of records that most people, most academics have used. It's somewhere in the range of 10 million pages of untranslated Arabic work, Arabic text. And this was the central archive of the Ba'ath Party sectariat in Baghdad up until 2003. It was initially taken by Iraqi dissidents with the help of, you know, they were working with the US Government and the Department of Defense. But it was Iraqi dissidents that took these, these archives that went into Iraq after 2003 with the hope of opening some sort of peace and reconciliation center in Baghdad. That never really came to fruition. It was just too dangerous. The country was spiraling into a civil war in the early 2000s and the years after the war. And so they made a controversial decision to remove those records from Iraq. They thought they were safeguarding them, so they brought them to the United States. They brought them to the Hoover, to the Hoover archives. They were scanned. Scholars have been working with them. The original records were eventually returned to Iraq, but the scanned files are still available at Hoover. So that's the first set, these Bath Party records. The second set of records were state records. These were records that the US military came into Iraq in 2003 and took possession of. These never made it to the United States. They were brought to Qatar and they were scanned. Now this is an enormous set. It's something like 100 million pages. But very few of them have been made available for reachers. Actually, it's a lot of records. It's just a very small portion of this 100 million. Probably something in the range of 100,000 pages, but also a few thousand hours of audio recording which is, which is very, very interesting. Initially the government wasn't really sure what to do with these, these records. They tried to just crowdsource it by putting it on online so that scholars could, could, could access it. They very quickly found out that there was a lot of problems in doing that. There were, you know, a lot of personal identified information in there. People, you know, who didn't choose to have, you know, Iraqi intelligence reporting on them and their names and personal information ended up in there. There's also, you know, some defense material in there about weapons systems that they didn't want the government, US Government didn't want online. So they, they pulled everything back and they decided to, you know, basically overcompensate by putting everything through a sensor. The sensor only had, you know, only couldn't speak Arabic. So everything had to be translated to English. They had an office that was doing this for a while at the National Defense University in Washington D.C. but they, after a few years they, they ran out of money and closed down. Eventually Hoover asked to house the records that they did that they did translate and make available. And those are now also digital copies of those are also held at Hoover. There's a few smaller collections at Hoover and elsewhere. There's a collection on Jewish Iraqis that is sort of in a legal limbo. It's not, I don't know exactly where it is right now. There was some fights between the Iraqi Jewish community, which is no longer in Iraq, and the Iraqi government about what to do with those records. And then there's some, some records on northern Iraq that were taken out before, prior to the 1991, which war are taken during the 1991 war by Kurds. So those are also at Hoover and a few on Jewish Iraqis that are at Hoover as well. So that's the sets of records that are there. It's a super unique archive for anyone working on the Middle East. Only thing we have of a modern Arab state where we can actually look behind the curtains and see what the decision making processes were. How are these, how are these decisions carried out, especially a lot of those audio recordings. What you have is Saddam Hussein sitting with his top advisors and he used to record his meetings. So you have the recordings of these meetings of how these decisions were being made. And it was the Ba'ath party that actually carried out a lot of the policies. So we can see if you put these archives together, you can listen to the discussion, tabletop discussions at the very high level, and then you can watch as the policies filter down and are carried out at the ground level and sometimes in quite different ways than were intended, you know, when the policies were made. So that's very interesting. And like I said, it's the only time, it's only the only place in the Arab world that we can, we can observe something like that.
[09:16]
B
Yeah, no, definitely very unique, but also massive. Right. Those numbers you just described are really way more than any one or any group of people really can of parse entirely and make sense of. So how did you kind of think about the sorts of key themes or questions or ideas that you and Lisa wanted to cover in this book?
[09:38]
A
So it was, you know, a combination of what we wanted and then what the, the contributors wanted. Because I'm happy to say we got almost all of the main contributor people who've been working with these, these records. You know, most of them were very eager to participate. And so, you know, we discussed with them, you know, what they wanted to cover. But basically we didn't want just a book that, you know, new scholarship on the record or something like that. We wanted to be more reflective. So it's a combination of, hey, what have we learned? You know, the questions we sort of asked people were, what have we learned? You know, where are the gaps and what's the future? So, you know, what can we do with these records? And, you know, we had some, some gaps that we were well aware of. For example, there is a, you know, a chapter on, on gender, which we were both aware was a large gap and we knew that Alyssa Walter had, had been working on this. So we, you know, we asked her, you know, will you, will you, would you cover that? And of course she was, she was happy, happy to do it. But other than in some cases like that, we sort of let people, you know, we gave them that broad framework and we let them come up with the answers themselves.
[11:04]
B
I mean, that definitely makes sense and it resulted in all sorts of interesting things. But of course there's lots of questions about this kind of critical perspective around, like, what is the archive? Right. That's already come up in some of the things that you've told us about and that comes up in Some of the chapters in the book. So you mentioned that the archives came to be held at the Hoover Institute. There were kind of various, you know, this got scanned there, this got scanned the other place. This got moved. But is there anything further we need to understand about how the archives came to be at the Hoover Institute and what that means in terms of who does and doesn't get to then use them for scholarship?
[11:39]
A
Yes. So this has been a huge question since the archives became available. I mean, the story that I gave you where, you know, there's some dissidents helped by the US Government, who. Who move the records outside of Iraq for safekeeping, there's two types. There's two sides to that story, and it's not unique to Iraq. This has been told in Western encounters with the wider world or colonial encounters with the wider world for a century or two now, where oftentimes things are moved outside of a country and end up in a museum in the European capital or in North America to protect them, but at the detriment of the people who actually live in those. Those countries. And so, you know, the story I gave sounds a lot like. Like that. And with both sides of it, you know, there were Iraqis who were very upset. Parts of the Iraqi government were. Were quite upset that these records were being moved outside of Iraq. They said this is just, you know, colonialism all over again. On the other hand, it was Iraqis who did it, and they did it, you know, with the help of other parts of the. The Iraqi government. And if you talk to the Iraqis who did it, who. A lot of them, some of them came with the archives. The United States are still working with them. They. They'll tell you that, you know, their wife was in danger and their families were in danger. It wasn't just the records that were in danger, but, you know, their own lives were in danger. And so they had to leave. And it was a real problem. But this has created all sorts of inequalities, right? Iraqi researchers who wanted to work with these records. It was really hard. It was hard for them to get a visa to the United States. It was financially difficult to come to Palo Alto, which is one of the more expensive places in the world to study these records. Now, it was more problematic, I think, if you're thinking about the ethics of this or the politics of it, before the records were returned to Iraq. Now the records have been returned to Iraq. You know, it's. It's a problem still, because the Iraqi government hasn't made those records available to to the scholars. But I guess, you know, the ethics of it have continued to be quite, quite cloudy, but it has affected the way, you know, the scholarship is written. People from outside the, outside of Iraq, Americans, for example, are very interested in issues of security in the Iraq wars that might not be the story that Iraq is inside of Iraq. They might be interested in different topics or approach the records in a different way. And so there are those imbalances that hopefully will one day be addressed.
[14:35]
B
Yeah. In terms of the kind of uses of the archives and the things that might be why people might be interested in the archive. Obviously there's lots of scholarly reasons. And you mentioned earlier kind of a unique way of seeing behind the scenes between a policy decision and then being able to trace to implementation. What about the kind of policy interests in these archives? What are some of the ways that they've been used or maybe misused outside of academia in the more policy sphere?
[15:03]
A
Yeah, I would say the ways it was attempted. We have some chapters in here. Everyone in here is a scholar in their own right. But some people have actually had much more intimate dealings with the policy community because they were involved in some way or another in the collecting of these archives on behalf of the US Government. We have a chapter by Kevin woods, for example, who led this effort post 2003. And you know, he talks about the attempts of, of policymakers, especially in the, the Bush administration, to somehow try to justify the Iraq war by using these, these records. And to Kevin's credit, you know, he, he, he kept everything really above board and, and didn't let these politics sort of interfere with, with their, with their conclusions. It doesn't mean that people haven't, haven't tried and there's been a few waves of it. I mean, I don't know we've discussed it so much in the volume. But for example, when ISIS came in, into, you know, sort of reappeared in 2014, you know, there was some attempts to use these records to make some argument that ISIS was actually a product of Saddam Hussein and that, you know, it was good therefore that the, you know, the Iraq War happened because what we were doing was stopping Saddam Hussein from making people like isis. Now, most of the people who worked with these records, I think have come to the opposite conclusion, right. That these groups like, you know, ISIS were a product of the Iraq War, not a product of Saddam Hussein. So whatever know, administration or previous administration officials in the United States wanted to happen with these records, I, I would think it's probably been the opposite. Most of the scholarship has been very critical, and it hasn't really been used to the extent that maybe the initiators of these projects wanted in order to justify their actions. And in most cases, it's been used to, to critique them and to add
[17:13]
B
nuance to things that we kind of maybe thought we knew at least some of the story about. And these archives have added additional understandings. So there's obviously a few different chapters that kind of touch on that sort of theme. But maybe we could talk about topics like the Ba'ath Party's relationship with tribes or Saddam Hussein's relationship with cards. Either. Both. Tell us about those.
[17:34]
A
Yeah, I mean, these are great topics to look at how these records can add. And I think what you're saying is, is nuance is absolutely the right word because what we had previously were just public pronouncements of the regime. And there was some very interesting scholarship that was done with these public pronouncements or things that maybe made their way into the media. And on tribes, for example, there was an idea that, oh, Saddam hussein and the Ba'ath party were anti tribe. And then they were, you know, they sort of backtracked and became pro tribe. And some of the scholarship that's come out has, has really, you know, added some nuance that there is something to that story. They were against, you know, tribalism in many places, and they seem to loosen up later. On the other hand, you know, part of that wasn't because they, they somehow, you know, like tribes, right? Sometimes. Somehow. Sometimes it was because they gained more control over these tribes. Or as one of the chapters we have in the book by Enid Voller discusses, you know, it depended on, on where you were, Right. So the Kurds, for example, the Iraqis Ba'ath Party had worked with the tribes, you know, from the beginning, and it's, it stayed more consistent throughout. So you can see in different, you know, places in different ways that the, the, the Iraqi regime dealt with tribes and, and the same with, with Kurds. On one hand, you know, the government in Iraq under Saddam Hussein had a very adversarial relationship with the Kurds. But we have an interesting chapter in here by a Chinese scholar in Ruhang Lee who shows that, you know, that wasn't always the case. And this was more contingent on things that happened in Iraqi history and other scholarship that's come out on the Kurds, you know, showing the nuances of that relationship, you know, where the regime maybe didn't understand the Kurds very much or, you know, and that led to some of the brutality against them because they couldn't use some of the more nuanced tactics that they used elsewhere inside of Iraq. It showed that Kurds, you know, at some point were also, you know, joining regime efforts. Very. Saw. Saw themselves as. As, you know, some Kurds saw themselves as Ba' Athist and as loyal Iraqis. On the other hand, you can see in these records that there are limits to that. You know, for example, you know, when they would track dissidents, the regime would track dissidents. They wouldn't track them based on sect like, you know, there's a whole literature on Sunnis and Shias and all the politics behind that. There was a kind of taboo on. On. On that inside of. Inside of Iraq. And so the regime wouldn't track, you know, a Shia dissident as a Shia dissident. They would track them as a. As a religious extremist or, you know, a dissident occurred, on the other hand, was always a Kurd. Right? This was. There was. There was no way around it. And that shows up. It shows up in the records. And they were treated differently because of that. So you can, you know, you can really home in on what the regime was thinking, how they treated different groups and how this evolved over time.
[21:14]
B
Yeah, really interesting to see this kind of level of detail that, as you said, is not something we really had particular access to before and kind of lets us move away from some of these, like, everything is evil, everything is great. You know, very black and white sort of assumptions about sort of how policy making happens. And this is, of course, true for lots of other key decisions that perhaps from the outside have maybe looked puzzling or like, oh, I'd love to know what's happening behind the scenes. You mentioned that these archives kind of allow some windows into some of those discussions. So, for instance, the interest in chemical weapons by Saddam's regime or the intricacies of the IraqRussia relationship or. Or both.
[21:53]
A
Yes. I mean, I think the. The, you know, the connections to weapons of mass destruction has been one at from the very beginning was something that. That, of course, the Bush administration was interested in at first to understand. You know, they thought that Iraqi had. Iraq had these weapons. And so they wanted to use these records to, you know, find out where those weapons are. Once it became clear that they didn't have them, they wanted to figure out what happens. And so this has been a question from the very beginning when it comes to these records. And the answers have evolved. But probably the best research we have on this is what malfred Heghammer discusses in her chapter in the book and what you answered, it's actually quite fascinating. She, you know, she has another article elsewhere which this kind of draws on, talking about a. Something what she calls a cheater's dilemma, which, you know, Iraq, it wasn't that one side was, you know, it wasn't that the United States was lying or the Iraqis were, were particularly innocent, but that there's, you know, a lot of misunderstandings on, on both sides. The Iraqis at the beginning do lie. They, they cheat, they try to hide some weapons of mass destruction, especially these, these chemical weapons and you know, they get caught. But instead of the United States, instead of Iraqis, you know, the United States, okay, they've come clean now we've caught them. The United States is, ah, see, we knew we couldn't, we couldn't trust them. And this left, you know, the sort of incentives in the, in all the wrong places because the Iraqis said, well, every time we come clean on something because, you know, they got caught once or twice, but then sometimes they try to come clean. And when they would come clean, the United States would say, yeah, we know that you are hiding these things and it's clear that you're, you're lying. So, you know, show us even more of what you have. Right. So the United States, because the Iraqis had tried to see them in the beginning, the United States never believed them when they did come clean, when the Iraqis did come clean, which created all sorts of problems, you know, even on the Iraqi side, why would you cooperate if every time you do come clean, every time you do cooperate, you get punished more? Right? They just say, oh, well, we knew you were cheating and here's some more sanctions. And so this left, you know, incentives in the wrong place for the Iraqis. It was an analytical error on the United States part and it leads to the disaster that we have in 2003. Now what Malfur does in this book is more interesting, I think, or more goes beyond that, where she discusses, okay, we have this empirical case, we have a lot of this empirical knowledge that these records have drawn. But one of the things that hasn't happened as much as maybe some of us expected when these archives open, is there hasn't been much theory drawn out of this case, so, you know, out of the case of, of Iraq. And so she uses this to try to develop some theories on inspections and deterrence and, and to bring this into sort of broader conversations that go well beyond Iraq. When you're dealing with some Some of the problems of, of non proliferation and weapons inspections and things like that for, you know, Iraqi relationships with Moscow. You have a couple of chapters in here. Kate Tinson, wisdom, Daniel Chardell, and this is part of a, I would say if you look at some of the dissertations and books that are coming out or some of the stuff that's come out recently, a lot of it has taken a kind of transnational or international turn, which has been, you know, my own opinion and you know, I'm biased because I've been a part of some of that work has been really fascinating to look beyond what these records can tell you, not just inside of Iraq, but they were reporting from all over the world. Iraqis had embassies, they had Baathists operating around the world. And so what does the end of the Cold War, for example, look like to an Iraqi in Moscow? I mean, this is fascinating and it tells us things that you can't get from, even from American or Russian records. For example, Iraqis were discussing the fissures between the Soviets and the United States as early as, you know, 1992. Now if you look in American records in 1992, it's looking like, hey, Russia is coming along and they're going to be on our side. The Cold War is over. This is before there was a sort of big divide over the Balkans or even NATO expansion, let alone everything that's happened in, in this century. But the Iraqis saw that there's going to be these divisions and the divisions were over things like Iraq and weapons inspections and places like that and, you know, issues like that. So, you know, the records can tell you a lot about, you know, Iraqi relations with, with Russia, they can tell you, but also just broader, broader topics like the end of the Cold War. You know, they have something to say about the end of the Cold War. And I think, you know, for Daniel Chardell also Lily Hindi's chapter in here, you know, they bring Iraq into this broader conversation. So something like the Gulf War, which Daniel works on, you know, it happened, it occurs in 1991, right at the end of the, the Cold War. And what Daniel shows is that actually this isn't there weren't just two events that happened side by side, right? They're deeply intertwined. And the Gulf War of 1991 is part of the end of the Cold War, and that's how it really should be seen. And similarly, Lilly Hindy discusses, at the end of the Cold War, you have this, this rise globally of this rise globally of things like human rights Discourse Right. In the post Cold War, you know, that also is affecting Iraq, and not just Iraq is affecting Iraq. Iraqis are taking part in this, especially the Kurds, as they try to make their case for independence in the 1990s, are very much feeding on and feeding into this global discourse.
[28:38]
B
Yeah, that definitely is an interesting aspect of this, kind of going deeper into what was happening in Iraq, but also sort of broadening out the story as well and finding connection. So it's not just about kind of domestic Iraqi politics or just US Iraqi politics. There's a lot more there and also probably things that haven't been explored yet or in the process of being investigated. A number of contributors in the volume, I noticed, kind of would mention that and kind of go, well, here's what I figured out so far. But we could go over here, we could go look at this. Do you want to tell us about some of those avenues for future research that are raised?
[29:14]
A
Yes. So, I mean, I think there's, there's a few, a few cases, a few, you know, aspects of this. Some have already been been been mentioned. The gender aspect is probably the biggest hole. There hasn't been a book or, you know, major article. There's been some smaller, you know, some smaller works on, on it. But they're, you know, Iraqi women play a huge role in, in Iraqi life. Right. First of all, but Also in the Ba'ath party itself, there are Iraqi women, you know, who are Ba' Athist, and they face unique challenges, sometimes being put in charge of, of committees or, you know, certain parts, certain projects. And there's certain Iraqi men who aren't happy about, about this. Right. And so, you know, Iraqi women have to navigate Baathist realities in a very unique and interesting way. And, you know, I think there's a lot to be said there. And then, you know, getting back to Malfred's chapter on theory, I think there's been, it's, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't call it disappointing, but it's been, you know, many of us have been surprised that there hasn't these records haven't made a sort of broader impact in sort of political science and history and other social sciences more generally, because they are a unique and a very rich source of information and data for scholars. And so, you know, for people working on this, there is a real opportunity, I would say, to start looking at these records not for what happened in Iraq, not answering questions which are very interesting. What happened, I think, is what a lot of us who have worked with these Records have been interested in what happened in Iraq, what happened with the weapons of mass destruction, why did these wars occur? How did Saddam Hussein rule? But start looking at these records as a source for telling us about broader theories that could be used elsewhere in the world. And there's always going to be, I think, you know, we talked about it from the beginning. These records are a great case study in how to deal with archives that are politically and ethically ambiguous in some ways, how to deal with hierarchies of knowledge between east and West. There's also a chapter in here by Michael Brill about how this archive itself was constructed, which is really interesting because you get about how are records preserved? Which records are preserved? How do we have access to them? And how does that shape what we know about the past? Right. It's not purely positivist. We can't just look back and say, this is the absolute truth and this is the way it happened. No, we have access to certain records because of historically contingent reasons and that shapes what we know about the past. And if we go to the next level, the way that policy would be. Know way these records inform policy is also related to the way that they are. They were collected. So there's always going to be, I think, more work to be done in that realm too about, you know, the, you know, work on the records themselves, on the archives, how they were constructed, how they're used and how they're transformed into scholarship and sort of policy analysis. So on all of these, these aspects, and then there's, as I mentioned, there's, you know, transnational aspects which are. I think we're just scratching the surface on that. We have in here international human rights. We have end of the Cold War. We have another interesting chapter on what this can tell us about sort of inter. Arab politics. Toby has a fascinating chapter about the Arabian Peninsula and Arab Baathists that are working in other countries in the Arabian Peninsula and what they're telling Baghdad about what they're doing. So we have, you know, sort of internal archives now not just of Iraq, but of other Arab states as well. Because, you know, Arab nationalist parties and parties that are operating in those countries are reporting back to Baghdad about what they're doing and what they know and how they understand the world. So I think there's, you know, there's. There's plenty more work to be done with these records for scholars who want to do it.
[34:04]
B
And is that what you're going to be doing next? Anything currently on your desk you want to give us a Sneak preview of.
[34:11]
A
So I think I'll give you the preview, but it's going to be a long way off. It's related to these records, and these records will play a part of it, but they're only a small part of it. When I, when I was writing a book called Iraq against the World, which was basically the role of Iraq in the post Cold War global politics, you know, using these, these records, you know, I was surprised at first to see, you know, how much of a role Iraq did play, which we, we, you know, we have discussed on, on a previous podcast. But in doing the research for that, that work, I noticed it wasn't just Iraq. Right. If you go to the UN archives or American archives, you can see or other sort of international archives, you can see that a lot of the great powers and international institutions are spending a lot of their time dealing with issues of coming from the Middle east in the 1990s. And that's the case because most of the world is liberalizing, is if you're in, if you're in Europe or Latin America or East Asia or Africa in, in the 1990s, it looks like the world is kind of moving in a certain direction towards a more liberal future. That's not the case in, in Middle East. And so, you know, these liberalizing trends sort of crash against some of the realities of the Middle East. And, you know, there are fights within the Middle east over this, right, from people who want to take it in, in a more liberal direction or more authoritarian direction or try to hold the, hold the line when it comes to religion. And so looking at how this played out through the 1990s, my, my thoughts now are very early on in this project is that it'll help us to understand very much our world today in the 21st, 21st century with democratic backsliding and illiberalization and issues like that. So that's where I'm at. Iraq is very much a big part of it, but so is the Arab Israeli conflict, so is transnational Islamic groups. So, you know, issues like Iran or Somalia. And so it's a, it's a much bigger project and it's going to take a long time and I'll probably have some smaller things that I work on, you know, in between or that come out of that project, because I think it's going to take several years. But yeah, that's where I'm, that's the direction I'm headed. At least I'll say that much.
[36:50]
B
Well, it certainly sounds like an interesting direction. So best of luck progressing along on that path. And of course, while you are doing it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing, which you co edited with Lisa Blades, titled Baathist Iraq through Archives, Reflections, Explorations, and Opportunities, published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Samuel, thank you so much for joining me again on the podcast.
[37:13]
A
Thanks so much for having me.
[37:14]
C
Again, thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ebooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.

Summary7 min read

Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guests: Dr. Samuel Helfont (Co-editor), Dr. Lisa Blaydes (Co-editor, referenced)
Book Discussed: Ba‘thist Iraq Through Archives: Reflections, Explorations, and Opportunities (Stanford University Press, 2026)
Date: July 29, 2026

This episode delves into the landmark volume edited by Samuel Helfont and Lisa Blaydes, which explores the recently accessible archives of Ba‘thist Iraq. The discussion centers not only on the new historical and political insights provided by these records but also on the complex questions of historiography, ethics, and archival politics. The richness of the source material, the challenges in accessing and interpreting it, and its importance for both scholarly and policy communities are all explored with depth and reflection.

Guest Introductions and Project Origins

[01:21 - 03:11]

Samuel Helfont introduces himself as an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Lisa Blaydes is described as a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and lead co-editor of the volume.

The project was conceived around the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, coinciding with a decade of scholarship emerging from the Ba‘thist archives. The editors aimed to reflect on what scholarship had achieved and to chart future research directions.

"We thought, you know, there’s been a lot written on them now. They were really new and they're still interesting. But after a decade, you know, we felt that it was worth taking a step back and looking at what people have done, what they haven’t done, what they could do, some of the issues that might be involved in researching these records."
— Samuel Helfont [01:59]

What Are the Ba‘thist Archives?

[03:11 - 09:16]

Scope and Location

Main Archives: Housed at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
- Ba‘th Party Records (~10 million pages, untranslated Arabic), originally in Baghdad.
- State Records (~100 million pages, small portion accessible; includes thousands of hours of audio).
Other collections: include pre-1991 Kurdish records and Jewish Iraqi collections, the latter in legal limbo.

Origins and Politics

Ba‘th Party records were removed post-2003 civil war crisis for safekeeping (controversially, by Iraqi dissidents with U.S. help).
Documents are unique—no other modern Arab state archive is accessible at this scale, especially with:
- Decision-making records (“Saddam Hussein sitting with his top advisors”).
- Policy implementation documents down to ground-level actions.

"You have the recordings of these meetings of how these decisions were being made ... it's the only place in the Arab world that we can observe something like that."
— Samuel Helfont [08:35]

Key Themes and Structure of the Volume

[09:16 - 11:03]

Editors wanted reflection, not just new findings.
Contributors were asked: “What have we learned? Where are the gaps? What’s the future?”
The process was collaborative, while ensuring important themes (e.g., gender) were addressed.

Critical Perspectives: Provenance, Ethics, and Accessibility

[11:03 - 14:34]

Removal of archives evokes comparisons to colonial transfer of artifacts.
Mixed Iraqi reactions—some view it as protection, others as a loss of national heritage.
Ongoing access disparities: U.S.-based researchers have had privileged access; Iraqi scholars face visa and financial hurdles.
Although physical archives have been returned to Iraq, most are not open to Iraqi scholars.

"This has created all sorts of inequalities, right? Iraqi researchers who wanted to work with these records... It was hard for them to get a visa to the United States. It was financially difficult to come to Palo Alto..."
— Samuel Helfont [12:39]

Policy Uses and Misuses of the Archives

[14:34 - 17:12]

U.S. policymakers initially attempted to justify the Iraq War with archival “evidence,” but this failed to achieve desired narratives.
Notable case: attempts to link ISIS origins to Saddam Hussein using flawed interpretations of the archives.
Instead, most scholarship using these records has been critical of postwar U.S. policy.

"Most of the people who worked with these records, I think, have come to the opposite conclusion, right—that these groups like ISIS were a product of the Iraq War, not a product of Saddam Hussein."
— Samuel Helfont [16:12]

Adding Nuance: Ba‘thist State, Tribe, and Ethnic Minorities

[17:12 - 21:52]

Tribes: Archives show the regime's tribal policy was more nuanced than previous thought; its approach varied by region and purpose.
- Example: In some Kurdish areas, cooperation with tribes was consistent; elsewhere, policy evolved as control changed.

"...you can really home in on what the regime was thinking, how they treated different groups and how this evolved over time."
— Samuel Helfont [20:50]

Kurds: The regime’s relationship with the Kurds was complex and shifted over time; some Kurds were regime participants.

Revelations: Weapons, Foreign Relations, and the End of the Cold War

[21:52 - 28:37]

Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs):

Malfred Heghammer's “cheater’s dilemma”: Iraq tried to hide and then come clean about WMDs, but was never trusted, leading to self-defeating cycles and, ultimately, the 2003 invasion.

"...every time we come clean on something... the United States would say, yeah, we know that you are hiding these things... so the United States, because the Iraqis had tried to deceive them in the beginning, the United States never believed them when they did come clean..."
— Samuel Helfont, summarizing Heghammer's findings [22:50]

Foreign Relations:

Emerging scholarship uses archives for transnational perspectives (e.g., Iraq-Russia relations, end of the Cold War, and global human rights discourse).
- Iraqi embassies and Ba‘thist agents reported on international politics, offering rare insights.

"What does the end of the Cold War, for example, look like to an Iraqi in Moscow? I mean, this is fascinating and it tells us things that you can't get from ... American or Russian records."
— Samuel Helfont [26:27]

Gaps and Future Research

[28:37 - 34:04]

Potential and Underexplored Themes:

Gender: Significant lack of research on women’s roles in the Ba‘th Party and Iraqi society, despite their presence in archival records.
Theory Development: Archives provide data for broader theories (e.g., authoritarianism, state-society relations, inspection regimes) but this potential is under-realized.
Archival Practices: Reflect on how archives themselves are constructed and their epistemological limits (see Michael Brill’s chapter).
Transnational Dimension: New avenues such as Ba‘thist operations in the wider Arab world, human rights, and global liberalization/illiberalization trends.
- Example: Ba‘thist reports from the Arabian Peninsula provide information about other Arab states.

"There's plenty more work to be done with these records for scholars who want to do it."
— Samuel Helfont [33:57]

Personal Research Preview: What's Next for Helfont

[34:04 - 36:49]

Next project will contextualize the Middle East’s "illiberal divergence" during the 1990s, using Iraqi and other archival sources.
Aims to connect Middle Eastern trajectories with present-day trends in democratic backsliding globally.

"Iraq is very much a big part of it, but so is the Arab Israeli conflict, so is transnational Islamic groups. ... It's a much bigger project and it's going to take a long time."
— Samuel Helfont [36:29]

Memorable Quotes

On the unique value of the archives:

"It's a super unique archive for anyone working on the Middle East. Only thing we have of a modern Arab state where we can actually look behind the curtains and see what the decision making processes were."
— Samuel Helfont [08:12]
On the politics of archival ownership:

"On the other hand, it was Iraqis who did it, and they did it, you know, with the help of other parts of the Iraqi government... It wasn't just the records that were in danger, but, you know, their own lives were in danger."
— Samuel Helfont [12:54]
On limitations and future promise:

"...we have access to certain records because of historically contingent reasons and that shapes what we know about the past."
— Samuel Helfont [31:49]

Important Timestamps

[01:21] Guest and project introduction
[03:11] Overview of the Ba‘thist archives
[09:38] Definition of key themes and structure of the book
[12:39] Ethics and politics of archive removal
[14:34] Policy uses and abuses of the records
[17:34] Nuanced perspectives on tribes and Kurds
[21:52] Revelations: WMDs and foreign relations
[28:37] Future directions for archival research
[34:11] Preview of Helfont's next research

Concluding Thoughts

This episode offers a thorough, candid look at the opportunities and dilemmas arising from the Ba‘thist Iraqi archives. It’s a must-listen for anyone interested in the historiography of the Middle East, the politics of knowledge production, and the enduring legacies of the Iraq War. The contributors' reflections highlight not just what we know about Ba‘thist Iraq, but how the very practice of history and scholarship is shaped by access, ethics, and the shifting politics of archives themselves.

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[00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
[00:05]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased to welcome back onto the podcast Dr. Samuel Helfont, to tell us about a latest book that he has co edited with Dr. Lisa blades and was published by Stanford University Press in 2026, titled Ba' Athist Iraq through the Reflections and Explorations and Opportunities, which as the title suggests, takes us, well, to some extent through the actual archives, but also through many different ways people have had of looking at the archives, which have now been available for research for a while now. And so we can actually kind of come to some conclusions sort of about what is there, what's not there, what is it like to look through the archives, what does it kind of require us or allow us to rethink or add nuance to? So it's a really interesting exploration of kind of lots of things. Obviously we're going to talk about Iraqi politics. Right. But also questions of historiography. What is an archive? Who gets to make those kinds of decisions? Who gets to investigate an archive? There's a lot wrapped up in this book. So, Samuel, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
[01:19]
A
Thanks for having me again.
[01:21]
B
Well, thank you for coming back. But for listeners who perhaps have not heard your previous interviews with me, could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and then tell us a bit about your co editor as well and the origins of this project.
[01:33]
A
Okay, yeah. Great. So my name is Samuel Helfont. I am an associate professor of Strategy and Policy in the Naval War College Program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. And my co editor who asked me to come on behalf of both of us, she is Lisa Blades and she is a professor of Political science at Stanford University. So the origins of this project were that we had both been working on these records for some time and we had both been working on them from the very early years that they were available. And as 2023 approached, two things were, were happening at the same time. First, it was the, the 10 year anniversary or the 20 year anniversary, excuse me, of the, of the Iraq War. So there was some interest in, you know, these records again. And there had been about a decade's worth of scholarship on these records. And so we, we thought, you know, there's been a lot written on them now. They were really new and, and, and they're still interesting. But after a decade, you know, we felt that it was worth taking A step back and looking at what people have done, what they haven't done, what they could do, some of the issues that. That might be involved in researching these. These records. So, you know, a few of these things came together just at. At the right time, and Lisa and I decided to. To put this project together.
[03:12]
B
Okay. That is a very helpful introduction to the project and gives us a sense of kind of the timeline we're talking about here for these archives. But can you give us more kind of background about them? I mean, how big are they? What sorts of things are in them? What. What are these archives?
[03:27]
A
Yes. So they're very large. There's several sets of these archives. They're both at the Hoover Institution Library archives today. And which I should admit this. I should state that these are, you know, this is part of the Hoover series at Stanford. And we received enormous help from the library and archives. The archivist there, the staff, the director, all were very generous with their time and money to help make this project come to being. So I should always mention that. And it's a great place to work for anyone who wants to go there. Just a quick plug, but. So there's two sets of records there right now that are the main sets. The first is the Bath Party records, which are the sort of main set of records that most people, most academics have used. It's somewhere in the range of 10 million pages of untranslated Arabic work, Arabic text. And this was the central archive of the Ba'ath Party sectariat in Baghdad up until 2003. It was initially taken by Iraqi dissidents with the help of, you know, they were working with the US Government and the Department of Defense. But it was Iraqi dissidents that took these, these archives that went into Iraq after 2003 with the hope of opening some sort of peace and reconciliation center in Baghdad. That never really came to fruition. It was just too dangerous. The country was spiraling into a civil war in the early 2000s and the years after the war. And so they made a controversial decision to remove those records from Iraq. They thought they were safeguarding them, so they brought them to the United States. They brought them to the Hoover, to the Hoover archives. They were scanned. Scholars have been working with them. The original records were eventually returned to Iraq, but the scanned files are still available at Hoover. So that's the first set, these Bath Party records. The second set of records were state records. These were records that the US military came into Iraq in 2003 and took possession of. These never made it to the United States. They were brought to Qatar and they were scanned. Now this is an enormous set. It's something like 100 million pages. But very few of them have been made available for reachers. Actually, it's a lot of records. It's just a very small portion of this 100 million. Probably something in the range of 100,000 pages, but also a few thousand hours of audio recording which is, which is very, very interesting. Initially the government wasn't really sure what to do with these, these records. They tried to just crowdsource it by putting it on online so that scholars could, could, could access it. They very quickly found out that there was a lot of problems in doing that. There were, you know, a lot of personal identified information in there. People, you know, who didn't choose to have, you know, Iraqi intelligence reporting on them and their names and personal information ended up in there. There's also, you know, some defense material in there about weapons systems that they didn't want the government, US Government didn't want online. So they, they pulled everything back and they decided to, you know, basically overcompensate by putting everything through a sensor. The sensor only had, you know, only couldn't speak Arabic. So everything had to be translated to English. They had an office that was doing this for a while at the National Defense University in Washington D.C. but they, after a few years they, they ran out of money and closed down. Eventually Hoover asked to house the records that they did that they did translate and make available. And those are now also digital copies of those are also held at Hoover. There's a few smaller collections at Hoover and elsewhere. There's a collection on Jewish Iraqis that is sort of in a legal limbo. It's not, I don't know exactly where it is right now. There was some fights between the Iraqi Jewish community, which is no longer in Iraq, and the Iraqi government about what to do with those records. And then there's some, some records on northern Iraq that were taken out before, prior to the 1991, which war are taken during the 1991 war by Kurds. So those are also at Hoover and a few on Jewish Iraqis that are at Hoover as well. So that's the sets of records that are there. It's a super unique archive for anyone working on the Middle East. Only thing we have of a modern Arab state where we can actually look behind the curtains and see what the decision making processes were. How are these, how are these decisions carried out, especially a lot of those audio recordings. What you have is Saddam Hussein sitting with his top advisors and he used to record his meetings. So you have the recordings of these meetings of how these decisions were being made. And it was the Ba'ath party that actually carried out a lot of the policies. So we can see if you put these archives together, you can listen to the discussion, tabletop discussions at the very high level, and then you can watch as the policies filter down and are carried out at the ground level and sometimes in quite different ways than were intended, you know, when the policies were made. So that's very interesting. And like I said, it's the only time, it's only the only place in the Arab world that we can, we can observe something like that.
[09:16]
B
Yeah, no, definitely very unique, but also massive. Right. Those numbers you just described are really way more than any one or any group of people really can of parse entirely and make sense of. So how did you kind of think about the sorts of key themes or questions or ideas that you and Lisa wanted to cover in this book?
[09:38]
A
So it was, you know, a combination of what we wanted and then what the, the contributors wanted. Because I'm happy to say we got almost all of the main contributor people who've been working with these, these records. You know, most of them were very eager to participate. And so, you know, we discussed with them, you know, what they wanted to cover. But basically we didn't want just a book that, you know, new scholarship on the record or something like that. We wanted to be more reflective. So it's a combination of, hey, what have we learned? You know, the questions we sort of asked people were, what have we learned? You know, where are the gaps and what's the future? So, you know, what can we do with these records? And, you know, we had some, some gaps that we were well aware of. For example, there is a, you know, a chapter on, on gender, which we were both aware was a large gap and we knew that Alyssa Walter had, had been working on this. So we, you know, we asked her, you know, will you, will you, would you cover that? And of course she was, she was happy, happy to do it. But other than in some cases like that, we sort of let people, you know, we gave them that broad framework and we let them come up with the answers themselves.
[11:04]
B
I mean, that definitely makes sense and it resulted in all sorts of interesting things. But of course there's lots of questions about this kind of critical perspective around, like, what is the archive? Right. That's already come up in some of the things that you've told us about and that comes up in Some of the chapters in the book. So you mentioned that the archives came to be held at the Hoover Institute. There were kind of various, you know, this got scanned there, this got scanned the other place. This got moved. But is there anything further we need to understand about how the archives came to be at the Hoover Institute and what that means in terms of who does and doesn't get to then use them for scholarship?
[11:39]
A
Yes. So this has been a huge question since the archives became available. I mean, the story that I gave you where, you know, there's some dissidents helped by the US Government, who. Who move the records outside of Iraq for safekeeping, there's two types. There's two sides to that story, and it's not unique to Iraq. This has been told in Western encounters with the wider world or colonial encounters with the wider world for a century or two now, where oftentimes things are moved outside of a country and end up in a museum in the European capital or in North America to protect them, but at the detriment of the people who actually live in those. Those countries. And so, you know, the story I gave sounds a lot like. Like that. And with both sides of it, you know, there were Iraqis who were very upset. Parts of the Iraqi government were. Were quite upset that these records were being moved outside of Iraq. They said this is just, you know, colonialism all over again. On the other hand, it was Iraqis who did it, and they did it, you know, with the help of other parts of the. The Iraqi government. And if you talk to the Iraqis who did it, who. A lot of them, some of them came with the archives. The United States are still working with them. They. They'll tell you that, you know, their wife was in danger and their families were in danger. It wasn't just the records that were in danger, but, you know, their own lives were in danger. And so they had to leave. And it was a real problem. But this has created all sorts of inequalities, right? Iraqi researchers who wanted to work with these records. It was really hard. It was hard for them to get a visa to the United States. It was financially difficult to come to Palo Alto, which is one of the more expensive places in the world to study these records. Now, it was more problematic, I think, if you're thinking about the ethics of this or the politics of it, before the records were returned to Iraq. Now the records have been returned to Iraq. You know, it's. It's a problem still, because the Iraqi government hasn't made those records available to to the scholars. But I guess, you know, the ethics of it have continued to be quite, quite cloudy, but it has affected the way, you know, the scholarship is written. People from outside the, outside of Iraq, Americans, for example, are very interested in issues of security in the Iraq wars that might not be the story that Iraq is inside of Iraq. They might be interested in different topics or approach the records in a different way. And so there are those imbalances that hopefully will one day be addressed.
[14:35]
B
Yeah. In terms of the kind of uses of the archives and the things that might be why people might be interested in the archive. Obviously there's lots of scholarly reasons. And you mentioned earlier kind of a unique way of seeing behind the scenes between a policy decision and then being able to trace to implementation. What about the kind of policy interests in these archives? What are some of the ways that they've been used or maybe misused outside of academia in the more policy sphere?
[15:03]
A
Yeah, I would say the ways it was attempted. We have some chapters in here. Everyone in here is a scholar in their own right. But some people have actually had much more intimate dealings with the policy community because they were involved in some way or another in the collecting of these archives on behalf of the US Government. We have a chapter by Kevin woods, for example, who led this effort post 2003. And you know, he talks about the attempts of, of policymakers, especially in the, the Bush administration, to somehow try to justify the Iraq war by using these, these records. And to Kevin's credit, you know, he, he, he kept everything really above board and, and didn't let these politics sort of interfere with, with their, with their conclusions. It doesn't mean that people haven't, haven't tried and there's been a few waves of it. I mean, I don't know we've discussed it so much in the volume. But for example, when ISIS came in, into, you know, sort of reappeared in 2014, you know, there was some attempts to use these records to make some argument that ISIS was actually a product of Saddam Hussein and that, you know, it was good therefore that the, you know, the Iraq War happened because what we were doing was stopping Saddam Hussein from making people like isis. Now, most of the people who worked with these records, I think have come to the opposite conclusion, right. That these groups like, you know, ISIS were a product of the Iraq War, not a product of Saddam Hussein. So whatever know, administration or previous administration officials in the United States wanted to happen with these records, I, I would think it's probably been the opposite. Most of the scholarship has been very critical, and it hasn't really been used to the extent that maybe the initiators of these projects wanted in order to justify their actions. And in most cases, it's been used to, to critique them and to add
[17:13]
B
nuance to things that we kind of maybe thought we knew at least some of the story about. And these archives have added additional understandings. So there's obviously a few different chapters that kind of touch on that sort of theme. But maybe we could talk about topics like the Ba'ath Party's relationship with tribes or Saddam Hussein's relationship with cards. Either. Both. Tell us about those.
[17:34]
A
Yeah, I mean, these are great topics to look at how these records can add. And I think what you're saying is, is nuance is absolutely the right word because what we had previously were just public pronouncements of the regime. And there was some very interesting scholarship that was done with these public pronouncements or things that maybe made their way into the media. And on tribes, for example, there was an idea that, oh, Saddam hussein and the Ba'ath party were anti tribe. And then they were, you know, they sort of backtracked and became pro tribe. And some of the scholarship that's come out has, has really, you know, added some nuance that there is something to that story. They were against, you know, tribalism in many places, and they seem to loosen up later. On the other hand, you know, part of that wasn't because they, they somehow, you know, like tribes, right? Sometimes. Somehow. Sometimes it was because they gained more control over these tribes. Or as one of the chapters we have in the book by Enid Voller discusses, you know, it depended on, on where you were, Right. So the Kurds, for example, the Iraqis Ba'ath Party had worked with the tribes, you know, from the beginning, and it's, it stayed more consistent throughout. So you can see in different, you know, places in different ways that the, the, the Iraqi regime dealt with tribes and, and the same with, with Kurds. On one hand, you know, the government in Iraq under Saddam Hussein had a very adversarial relationship with the Kurds. But we have an interesting chapter in here by a Chinese scholar in Ruhang Lee who shows that, you know, that wasn't always the case. And this was more contingent on things that happened in Iraqi history and other scholarship that's come out on the Kurds, you know, showing the nuances of that relationship, you know, where the regime maybe didn't understand the Kurds very much or, you know, and that led to some of the brutality against them because they couldn't use some of the more nuanced tactics that they used elsewhere inside of Iraq. It showed that Kurds, you know, at some point were also, you know, joining regime efforts. Very. Saw. Saw themselves as. As, you know, some Kurds saw themselves as Ba' Athist and as loyal Iraqis. On the other hand, you can see in these records that there are limits to that. You know, for example, you know, when they would track dissidents, the regime would track dissidents. They wouldn't track them based on sect like, you know, there's a whole literature on Sunnis and Shias and all the politics behind that. There was a kind of taboo on. On. On that inside of. Inside of Iraq. And so the regime wouldn't track, you know, a Shia dissident as a Shia dissident. They would track them as a. As a religious extremist or, you know, a dissident occurred, on the other hand, was always a Kurd. Right? This was. There was. There was no way around it. And that shows up. It shows up in the records. And they were treated differently because of that. So you can, you know, you can really home in on what the regime was thinking, how they treated different groups and how this evolved over time.
[21:14]
B
Yeah, really interesting to see this kind of level of detail that, as you said, is not something we really had particular access to before and kind of lets us move away from some of these, like, everything is evil, everything is great. You know, very black and white sort of assumptions about sort of how policy making happens. And this is, of course, true for lots of other key decisions that perhaps from the outside have maybe looked puzzling or like, oh, I'd love to know what's happening behind the scenes. You mentioned that these archives kind of allow some windows into some of those discussions. So, for instance, the interest in chemical weapons by Saddam's regime or the intricacies of the IraqRussia relationship or. Or both.
[21:53]
A
Yes. I mean, I think the. The, you know, the connections to weapons of mass destruction has been one at from the very beginning was something that. That, of course, the Bush administration was interested in at first to understand. You know, they thought that Iraqi had. Iraq had these weapons. And so they wanted to use these records to, you know, find out where those weapons are. Once it became clear that they didn't have them, they wanted to figure out what happens. And so this has been a question from the very beginning when it comes to these records. And the answers have evolved. But probably the best research we have on this is what malfred Heghammer discusses in her chapter in the book and what you answered, it's actually quite fascinating. She, you know, she has another article elsewhere which this kind of draws on, talking about a. Something what she calls a cheater's dilemma, which, you know, Iraq, it wasn't that one side was, you know, it wasn't that the United States was lying or the Iraqis were, were particularly innocent, but that there's, you know, a lot of misunderstandings on, on both sides. The Iraqis at the beginning do lie. They, they cheat, they try to hide some weapons of mass destruction, especially these, these chemical weapons and you know, they get caught. But instead of the United States, instead of Iraqis, you know, the United States, okay, they've come clean now we've caught them. The United States is, ah, see, we knew we couldn't, we couldn't trust them. And this left, you know, the sort of incentives in the, in all the wrong places because the Iraqis said, well, every time we come clean on something because, you know, they got caught once or twice, but then sometimes they try to come clean. And when they would come clean, the United States would say, yeah, we know that you are hiding these things and it's clear that you're, you're lying. So, you know, show us even more of what you have. Right. So the United States, because the Iraqis had tried to see them in the beginning, the United States never believed them when they did come clean, when the Iraqis did come clean, which created all sorts of problems, you know, even on the Iraqi side, why would you cooperate if every time you do come clean, every time you do cooperate, you get punished more? Right? They just say, oh, well, we knew you were cheating and here's some more sanctions. And so this left, you know, incentives in the wrong place for the Iraqis. It was an analytical error on the United States part and it leads to the disaster that we have in 2003. Now what Malfur does in this book is more interesting, I think, or more goes beyond that, where she discusses, okay, we have this empirical case, we have a lot of this empirical knowledge that these records have drawn. But one of the things that hasn't happened as much as maybe some of us expected when these archives open, is there hasn't been much theory drawn out of this case, so, you know, out of the case of, of Iraq. And so she uses this to try to develop some theories on inspections and deterrence and, and to bring this into sort of broader conversations that go well beyond Iraq. When you're dealing with some Some of the problems of, of non proliferation and weapons inspections and things like that for, you know, Iraqi relationships with Moscow. You have a couple of chapters in here. Kate Tinson, wisdom, Daniel Chardell, and this is part of a, I would say if you look at some of the dissertations and books that are coming out or some of the stuff that's come out recently, a lot of it has taken a kind of transnational or international turn, which has been, you know, my own opinion and you know, I'm biased because I've been a part of some of that work has been really fascinating to look beyond what these records can tell you, not just inside of Iraq, but they were reporting from all over the world. Iraqis had embassies, they had Baathists operating around the world. And so what does the end of the Cold War, for example, look like to an Iraqi in Moscow? I mean, this is fascinating and it tells us things that you can't get from, even from American or Russian records. For example, Iraqis were discussing the fissures between the Soviets and the United States as early as, you know, 1992. Now if you look in American records in 1992, it's looking like, hey, Russia is coming along and they're going to be on our side. The Cold War is over. This is before there was a sort of big divide over the Balkans or even NATO expansion, let alone everything that's happened in, in this century. But the Iraqis saw that there's going to be these divisions and the divisions were over things like Iraq and weapons inspections and places like that and, you know, issues like that. So, you know, the records can tell you a lot about, you know, Iraqi relations with, with Russia, they can tell you, but also just broader, broader topics like the end of the Cold War. You know, they have something to say about the end of the Cold War. And I think, you know, for Daniel Chardell also Lily Hindi's chapter in here, you know, they bring Iraq into this broader conversation. So something like the Gulf War, which Daniel works on, you know, it happened, it occurs in 1991, right at the end of the, the Cold War. And what Daniel shows is that actually this isn't there weren't just two events that happened side by side, right? They're deeply intertwined. And the Gulf War of 1991 is part of the end of the Cold War, and that's how it really should be seen. And similarly, Lilly Hindy discusses, at the end of the Cold War, you have this, this rise globally of this rise globally of things like human rights Discourse Right. In the post Cold War, you know, that also is affecting Iraq, and not just Iraq is affecting Iraq. Iraqis are taking part in this, especially the Kurds, as they try to make their case for independence in the 1990s, are very much feeding on and feeding into this global discourse.
[28:38]
B
Yeah, that definitely is an interesting aspect of this, kind of going deeper into what was happening in Iraq, but also sort of broadening out the story as well and finding connection. So it's not just about kind of domestic Iraqi politics or just US Iraqi politics. There's a lot more there and also probably things that haven't been explored yet or in the process of being investigated. A number of contributors in the volume, I noticed, kind of would mention that and kind of go, well, here's what I figured out so far. But we could go over here, we could go look at this. Do you want to tell us about some of those avenues for future research that are raised?
[29:14]
A
Yes. So, I mean, I think there's, there's a few, a few cases, a few, you know, aspects of this. Some have already been been been mentioned. The gender aspect is probably the biggest hole. There hasn't been a book or, you know, major article. There's been some smaller, you know, some smaller works on, on it. But they're, you know, Iraqi women play a huge role in, in Iraqi life. Right. First of all, but Also in the Ba'ath party itself, there are Iraqi women, you know, who are Ba' Athist, and they face unique challenges, sometimes being put in charge of, of committees or, you know, certain parts, certain projects. And there's certain Iraqi men who aren't happy about, about this. Right. And so, you know, Iraqi women have to navigate Baathist realities in a very unique and interesting way. And, you know, I think there's a lot to be said there. And then, you know, getting back to Malfred's chapter on theory, I think there's been, it's, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't call it disappointing, but it's been, you know, many of us have been surprised that there hasn't these records haven't made a sort of broader impact in sort of political science and history and other social sciences more generally, because they are a unique and a very rich source of information and data for scholars. And so, you know, for people working on this, there is a real opportunity, I would say, to start looking at these records not for what happened in Iraq, not answering questions which are very interesting. What happened, I think, is what a lot of us who have worked with these Records have been interested in what happened in Iraq, what happened with the weapons of mass destruction, why did these wars occur? How did Saddam Hussein rule? But start looking at these records as a source for telling us about broader theories that could be used elsewhere in the world. And there's always going to be, I think, you know, we talked about it from the beginning. These records are a great case study in how to deal with archives that are politically and ethically ambiguous in some ways, how to deal with hierarchies of knowledge between east and West. There's also a chapter in here by Michael Brill about how this archive itself was constructed, which is really interesting because you get about how are records preserved? Which records are preserved? How do we have access to them? And how does that shape what we know about the past? Right. It's not purely positivist. We can't just look back and say, this is the absolute truth and this is the way it happened. No, we have access to certain records because of historically contingent reasons and that shapes what we know about the past. And if we go to the next level, the way that policy would be. Know way these records inform policy is also related to the way that they are. They were collected. So there's always going to be, I think, more work to be done in that realm too about, you know, the, you know, work on the records themselves, on the archives, how they were constructed, how they're used and how they're transformed into scholarship and sort of policy analysis. So on all of these, these aspects, and then there's, as I mentioned, there's, you know, transnational aspects which are. I think we're just scratching the surface on that. We have in here international human rights. We have end of the Cold War. We have another interesting chapter on what this can tell us about sort of inter. Arab politics. Toby has a fascinating chapter about the Arabian Peninsula and Arab Baathists that are working in other countries in the Arabian Peninsula and what they're telling Baghdad about what they're doing. So we have, you know, sort of internal archives now not just of Iraq, but of other Arab states as well. Because, you know, Arab nationalist parties and parties that are operating in those countries are reporting back to Baghdad about what they're doing and what they know and how they understand the world. So I think there's, you know, there's. There's plenty more work to be done with these records for scholars who want to do it.
[34:04]
B
And is that what you're going to be doing next? Anything currently on your desk you want to give us a Sneak preview of.
[34:11]
A
So I think I'll give you the preview, but it's going to be a long way off. It's related to these records, and these records will play a part of it, but they're only a small part of it. When I, when I was writing a book called Iraq against the World, which was basically the role of Iraq in the post Cold War global politics, you know, using these, these records, you know, I was surprised at first to see, you know, how much of a role Iraq did play, which we, we, you know, we have discussed on, on a previous podcast. But in doing the research for that, that work, I noticed it wasn't just Iraq. Right. If you go to the UN archives or American archives, you can see or other sort of international archives, you can see that a lot of the great powers and international institutions are spending a lot of their time dealing with issues of coming from the Middle east in the 1990s. And that's the case because most of the world is liberalizing, is if you're in, if you're in Europe or Latin America or East Asia or Africa in, in the 1990s, it looks like the world is kind of moving in a certain direction towards a more liberal future. That's not the case in, in Middle East. And so, you know, these liberalizing trends sort of crash against some of the realities of the Middle East. And, you know, there are fights within the Middle east over this, right, from people who want to take it in, in a more liberal direction or more authoritarian direction or try to hold the, hold the line when it comes to religion. And so looking at how this played out through the 1990s, my, my thoughts now are very early on in this project is that it'll help us to understand very much our world today in the 21st, 21st century with democratic backsliding and illiberalization and issues like that. So that's where I'm at. Iraq is very much a big part of it, but so is the Arab Israeli conflict, so is transnational Islamic groups. So, you know, issues like Iran or Somalia. And so it's a, it's a much bigger project and it's going to take a long time and I'll probably have some smaller things that I work on, you know, in between or that come out of that project, because I think it's going to take several years. But yeah, that's where I'm, that's the direction I'm headed. At least I'll say that much.
[36:50]
B
Well, it certainly sounds like an interesting direction. So best of luck progressing along on that path. And of course, while you are doing it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing, which you co edited with Lisa Blades, titled Baathist Iraq through Archives, Reflections, Explorations, and Opportunities, published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Samuel, thank you so much for joining me again on the podcast.
[37:13]
A
Thanks so much for having me.
[37:14]
C
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