Saddam Hussein was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. He also served as prime minister of Iraq from 1979 to 1991 and later from 1994 to 2003. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and later its Iraqi regional branch. Ideologically, he espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, while the policies and political ideas he championed are collectively known as Saddamism.
Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, and conservative political commentator. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, and other media outlets.
Condoleezza Rice is an American diplomat and political scientist. She currently directs the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 66th United States secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 and as the 19th U.S. national security advisor from 2001 to 2005. Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state and the first woman to serve as national security advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch. At the time of her appointment as Secretary of State, Rice was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States to be in the presidential line of succession.
The takbīr is the name for the Arabic phrase Allāhu ʾakbar.
The Hoover Institution is an American public policy think tank which promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government. While the institution is formally a unit of Stanford University, it maintains an independent board of overseers and relies on its own income and donations. It is widely described as conservative, although its directors have contested the idea that it is partisan.
After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, evidence began to emerge of failed attempts by the Iraqi government to bring the conflict to a peaceful resolution.
Bruce Pitcairn Jackson is the founder and president of the Project on Transitional Democracies. The project is a multi-year endeavor aimed at accelerating the pace of reform in post-1989 democracies and advancing the date for the integration of these democracies into the institutions of the Euro-Atlantic.
Stephen Forester Hayes is an American journalist and author. In October 2019 Hayes co-founded the online opinion and news publication The Dispatch. Previously, he was a senior writer for National Journal and Editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard. He was a staunch proponent of the Iraq War and an influential figure in promoting the debunked conspiracy that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had an operational relationship.
Peter Berkowitz is an American political philosopher and legal scholar. In 2019–2021, he served as the Director of Policy Planning at the United States Department of State. He currently serves as the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and as director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship. He is also a columnist for RealClearPolitics.
Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi-American academic and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention with Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-selling book after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and with Cruelty and Silence (1991), a critique of the Arab intelligentsia. In 2003, Makiya lobbied the U.S. government to invade Iraq and oust Hussein.
Robert Hessen was an American economic and business historian. He was a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a senior research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. He was an Objectivist and authored several books, analyzing business and economic issues from an Objectivist perspective.
Con Coughlin is a British journalist and author, currently The Daily Telegraph defence editor.
Bob Drogin is an American journalist and author. He worked for the Los Angeles Times, for nearly four decades. Drogin began his career with the Times as a national correspondent, based in New York, traveling to nearly every state in the United States. He spent eight years as a foreign correspondent, and as bureau chief in Manila and Johannesburg, before returning to the U.S. He covered intelligence and national security in the Washington bureau, from 1998 until retiring in November 2020.
The Habbush letter, or Habbush memo, is a handwritten message dated July 1, 2001, which appears to show a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq's government. It purports to be a direct communication between the head of Iraqi Intelligence, General Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, outlining mission training which Mohamed Atta, one of the organizers of the September 11 attacks, supposedly received in Iraq. The letter also claims that Hussein accepted a shipment from Niger, an apparent reference to an alleged uranium acquisition attempt that U.S. President George W. Bush cited in his January 2003 State of the Union address.
Melvyn Paul Leffler is an American historian and educator, currently Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Bancroft Prize for his book A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War, and the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for his book For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War.
Making Our Economy Right (MOER) is a free market think tank in Bangladesh. Headquartered in Dhaka, the institute was established in 1991 by Nizam Ahmad. MOER is sponsored by the Atlas Foundation in the United States. Deroy Murdock, an American libertarian syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, is an advisory board member of MOER.
Michael Robert Auslin is an American historian, writer, and policy analyst, known for his work on U.S-Asian relations. He is currently the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and was formerly an associate professor of history at Yale University. Since 2024, he has published The Patowmack Packet, a Substack containing articles on the history of Washington, D.C.
Scott William Atlas is an American radiologist, political commentator, and health care policy advisor. He is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank located at Stanford University. During the United States presidential campaigns of 2008, 2012, and 2016, Atlas was a Senior Advisor for Health Care to several presidential candidates. From 1998 to 2012 he was a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.
Fabrice Balanche is a geographer and specialist in the political geography and the geopolitics of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Middle East in general.
The Ba'ath Party archives are a trove of archival documents relating to the history and governance of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party under the rule of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein from 1968 to 2003. U.S. officials seized the archives in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The U.S. government completed its handover of the archive back to Iraq in 2020.
