The Demonic Comedy

Fusing gonzo journalism with lucid political history, this hilarious, insightful and skewering look at Saddam Hussein's Iraq presents Westerners with a rare window into a country and a people often demonized but rarely understood. A Canadian journalist and film producer with a doctorate in ancient Middle Eastern history, Roberts has written similarly lively and perspicacious books on India (Empire of the Soul) and biblical history (In Search of the Birth of Jesus). Here he relates three very different trips he took to Iraq during the 1990s. The first finds him covering the 1990 Arab Summit held in Baghdad in which he vividly details how Hussein's Stasi-trained secret police keeps the population in a terrified state of ""perpetual Inquisition."" The section's darkly comic centerpiece is Roberts's interview with Saddam himself, on a morning when Roberts, desperately hungover, accidentally downs a long-lost tab of Ecstasy. Even on a drug that inspires feelings of expansive love, Roberts is chilled by Hussein's presence. Part II traces Roberts's 1991 experiences as one of the few journalists to witness the devastation suffered by Iraqi civilians during the Gulf war--casualties flatly denied by the U.S. State Department. In the final section, he attends the 1995 ""International Babylon Festival"" and visits a people all but destroyed by 1000% inflation. Roberts offers provocative insights on the Gulf war: drawing on interviews with April Glaspie, America's ambassador to Iraq, he shows that officials of the Bush administration were neither surprised by the invasion of Kuwait nor unaware of what America stood to gain by it. Reading a bit like a tonier, liberal P.J. O'Rourke, Roberts proves a witty equal-opportunity skeptic. (Sept.)