"Drawing on his decades of researching the region and his 18 earlier books, Rubin has produced a magisterial overview of the contemporary Middle East. Highly recommended."
-Choice

This updated edition of Charles Tripp's A History of Iraq covers events since 1998, and looks at present-day developments right up to mid-2002. Since its establishment by the British in the 1920s Iraq has witnessed the rise and fall of successive regimes, culminating in the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, whose threatened regime is now the center of the current political storm. Tripp traces Iraq's political history from its nineteenth-century roots in the Ottoman empire, to the development of the state, its transformation from monarchy to republic and the rise of the Ba'th party and the ascendancy of Saddam Hussein.