Article Review Joseph Sassoon. “The East German Ministry for State Security and Iraq, 1968-1989.” Journal of Cold War Studies 16:1 (Winter 2014): 4-23

The article explores the relationship between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Iraq during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, a period which proved decisive for the rise and demise of the two countries. The author, who has already undertaken extensive and in-depth research into the contemporary history of Iraq and the patterns of Baathist rule over that country,1 now focuses his attention on the intelligence cooperation between the GDR Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staastsicherheit, MfS), widely known for its acronym ‘Stasi,’ and its counterpart in Iraq. The archival evidence and the reconstruction provided by Joseph Sassoon returns the relations between the two countries to the kind of ‘normal’ patterns of state-to-state interaction, based on the contingencies of the convergence and divergence of interests, visions of international relations, and the practice of domestic rule. As such, the article might well mark a decisive point in the debate, which has often been politically charged, over state-building and authoritarianism in the Middle East and their international connections.