Ongoingly, I would like to go on with Iraq books by Ms. Sakai. For today, "Iraq and America" (2002, Iwanami Shinsho). In this book, Ms. Sakai traces the transitions of the U.S. policies to Iraq, as well as the changes of Saddam Hussein's strategies both inside and outside of the country. 

As for the Middle East, we tend to see religious or cultural conflicts as the causes for the confrontation with Europe and the U.S., but it is more likely the case that there are political and economic reasons in the background, for which a cause of religion is claimed to justify the fray. 

As discussed in "Middle East Issues", such religious/cultural conflicts are rooted in the incitements by Western countries that sought for their own interest. Ironically, they now suffer from the conflicts that should have served for them. 

Because communism holds atheistic world view, it doesn't go together with Muslim countries. Iraq is one of few exceptions in this regard. Saddam Hussein redistributed the oil income to Iraqi people. At earlier times, he was generous to his opponents Kurds or Shias, building roads and houses in Kurdish areas or Shia's sanctuary Najaf and Karbala. 

For the Baath party administration, he adopted the meritocracy and installed a council in the Kurdish autonomous areas. The democratization policy was merely a formality. He placed various security and surveillance systems to solidify his control. 

Iran-Iraq war broke out in 1979, for which Hussein successfully gained huge economic assistance by the Gulf countries in return for protecting them from Iran. As the U.S. and European countries supported Iraq, too, Hussein went ahead with the militarization. Kuwait was one of the Gulf countries that supported Iraq and sent significant financial loans to Iraq. 

After Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein planned to raise the oil price to adjust the inflation and supply shortage, and called for coordination to the Gulf countries. Kuwait, however, did not only dismissed it but also demanded Iraq to repay the debt. With resentment, Iraq invaded Kuwait in expectation of condonation by the U.S. To Hussein's disappointment, the U.S. completely changed its attitude toward Iraq and decided to go to the Gulf war in 1990. As the next artifice, Hussein tried to create a linkage between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. His claim gained a large support in the Arab world, but Hussein became shackled by this powerful story of an Arabic hero. 

A secular nationalist Saddam Hussein is ideologically opposite to Usama Bin-Laden, a strict Islamic activist. According to Ms. Sakai, however, they are similar in terms of their characteristics as "monsters generated in relation with the Western countries including the U.S. This means that these monsters were generated from and within the US-Soviet antagonism during the Cold War. But they were in direct opposition to the Western world, still operating on the same antagonistic structure. Both Hussein and Bin-Laden survived by taking advantages of the US-Soviet antagonism. Then, as Ms. Sakai said, the biggest question to us is how we can break away from such a structure.