"John Simpson has spent more than twenty years reporting on Saddam Hussein's Iraq: he saw his missiles strike Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War and was lucky to escape Saddam's poison gas at the battle of the Faw Peninsula. His friend Farzad Bazoft of the Observer was hanged by Saddam in 1990 and Simpson was the first foreign journalist to reach Baghdad, a month or so afterwards. He spent six months there before, during and after the Gulf War of 1990-1 and was then barred from ever returning again. More than ten years later, in the spring of 2003, as George W. Bush mobilized United States troops, supported by Tony Blair and British forces, Simpson returned to Iraq for the first time to cover the new Gulf War - a war in which he was injured and his translator killed." "The Wars Against Saddam, however, is not simply an account of the recent war and its ongoing and unresolved consequences. It is an account of the West's relationship with Iraq throughout the years that Simpson has reported on the country and on Saddam Hussein. With his extensive knowledge of Iraq's bloodstained history and of the forces that made Saddam Hussein into the dictator he became, Simpson fills in the background, from the early years of the last century to the present. He examines the period leading up to the first Gulf War, the war itself and its immediate aftermath. He describes the increasing tyranny of Saddam's regime in the years that followed the war, the reality of his weapons programme and why the UN weapons inspectors were allowed to return and what they discovered when they did. He shows in minute detail how and why, in the wake of 11 September, the threat from Iraq seemed to be increasing and how and why the West went to war in March 2003."--BOOK JACKET.