Word: coughlin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...survival amid a ceaseless threat of plots, feuding and betrayal. He rose swiftly in the Baath Party by specializing in the dirty work of security and soon turned himself into a shaqawah, or man to be feared. "He killed lots of people to get to the top," says Con Coughlin, author of a recent Saddam biography, all the while knowing that "they could get to the top by killing him." According to another biographer, London professor Efraim Karsh, Saddam once told a visitor he could see betrayal in a man's eyes before the man had planned anything. "This enables...
Iraq is Saddam, he likes to say, and Saddam is Iraq. He has been a ruler, says Coughlin, who "has always had one eye on history." He has longed for his name to go down in Arab history alongside those of the culture's great heroes, like Nebuchadnezzar, who drove the Jews into Babylonian captivity, and Saladin, who retook Jerusalem from the Christian Crusaders. He wanted to fulfill the modern-day promise of Egypt's great nationalist Gamal Abdul Nasser, restoring Arab unity and the greater Arab nation to its rightful place in the world. In recent years the standard...
...Staff writer Sean W. Coughlin can be reached at coughl@fas.harvard.edu...
...Staff writer Sean W. Coughlin can be reached at coughl@fas.harvard.edu...
...Staff writer Sean W. Coughlin can be reached at coughl@fas.harvard.edu...