This is a transcript of a meeting between Saddam and Yasir Arafat in early 1991. They discuss the military and diplomatic confrontation between Iraq and the United States. Saddam discusses the balance of power following the Cold War, as well as U.S. Support for Israel. He argues that the United States will certainly attack Iraq, but it will be defeated. He discusses the need for Arab allies.

This undated audio file is of a meeting presided by Saddam Hussein and attended by several Iraqi officials discussing the following issues: the Iran-Iraq War, trying to avoid damage to Iraqi Oil Establishments, and attacks on al-Basrah and Iraqi Oil Establishments in 1979. Discussions also cover Iraqi water borders, internal development within Iraq, Arab potential to develop nuclear weapons and the impact of such a program, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and peace operations around the world and particularly the Arab world.

Letter to Saudi Crown Prince Abdallah Bin Abdul Aziz from Saddam Hussein Asking for Help and Admitting a Mistake; Letter from Izzat Ibrahim to the Same Prince

This file includes a handwritten letter from Qasim Salam to Saddam Hussein dated 19 October 1978 regarding the latest events in Yemen and some notes on these events, including the Saudi-Yemeni conspiracy to kill Ba'ath Party members.

Saddam Hussein in a meeting with his cabinet in February or March 1991, around the conclusion of the Gulf War. Saddam discusses the depravity of the United States and the injustice of American military action. He disparages other Arab leaders. He compares himself to previous Arab leaders, and discusses the Palestinian question.

This file contains a National Command meeting presided over by Saddam Hussein. The attendees discuss the Baath party and its role in national development, the relationship between the Arab countries and Europe, and the international balance of power following the Cold War.

This audio file contains: A meeting between Saddam Hussein and other high ranking personnel.  They discussed the U.S.‐Israel relationship and Yasser Arafat's peace initiative; the 1967 war with Israel; the roles of NATO and the Warsaw Pact; America's oil needs; Jewish immigration to Israel; the end of the Cold War and the international system; the 1956 war against Egypt; a comparison between Iraqi and Israeli military capabilities.

File contains two dossiers. First concerns a meeting between Saddam and the Yemeni President, Ali Abdullah Saleh; the second concerns a meeting between Saddam and Dr. George Habash, Secretary General of the Popular Front of the PLO.

Fu’ad Mursi (1925-1990), the author of the text printed here (an English excerpt translated from an Arabic-language monograph), was an Egyptian economist trained in Alexandria and the Sorbonne. While in Paris, he joined the French Communist Party. Back in Egypt, he in 1949 co-founded al-Hizb al-shuiu‘i al-misri, or the Egyptian Communist Party (ECP).

Born 27 years after a communist party had first been opened in the country, the ECP, also known as Rayat al-sha‘ab (The People’s Banner) after the title of its organ, was the smallest, most clandestine, and most intellectual communist group then operating in Egypt. It favored a two-state-solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, was opposed to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), and in 1958 initiated the merger of Egypt’s communist parties (under the condition that Jews would be excluded), a story told e.g. in Joel Beinin’s Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (1990). Nasser’s regime, which from the start had a difficult relationship with domestic communists, turned to open repression in 1959, locking up many party members in brutal desert prisons until 1964. The next year the party dissolved itself under pressure from the regime, which, however, also co-opted some individuals. Mursi was one of them.

Moreover, after Nasser’s death, Mursi early on continued a government career under the new president Anwar Sadat (1918-1981). In 1971, he became director of the state Industrial Bank and member of the Central Bank board, and in 1972 Minister of Supply and Domestic Commerce. The following year he resigned, however. Still a Marxist, he disagreed with Sadat’s policy of economic opening, infitah. While prepared from 1971, this policy became official in 1974—a story whose classic treatment is John Waterbury’s The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (1983) and whose social dimension is told by Relli Shechter’s The Rise of the Egyptian Middle Class: Socio-Economic Mobility and Public Discontent from Nasser to Sadat (2019).

The text printed here reflects a key component in Mursi’s analysis of the infitah. He diagnoses a cooperation between private Egyptian capitalists—who were now on the rise again after the decline of Nasserite state capitalism (aka socialism)—and foreign capitalist colonialism that, while not any more occupying Egypt, again wishes to exploit the country

As other documents in this collection on Moroccan nationalists in 1947 and 1950 have exemplified, the United Nations was an important arena in decolonization struggles for Arabs, as it was for Asians and Africans as e.g. Alanna O’Malley’s The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo crisis, 1960-1964 (2018) has shown. In this regard, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964 and taken over by the Fatah movement in 1969, was no exception.

To be sure, Palestinian organizations including Fatah and the PLO decried key UN actions. One was the UN Palestine partition plan of 1947; another was UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967. Calling upon Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied” during the Six-Day War in June and calling for the “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace,” it did not mention Palestine or the Palestinians. Even so, the PLO sought to get access to the UN and UN recognition. A crucial landmark on this road was the address to the UN in New York in November 1974 by Yassir Arafat (1929-2004), a Fatah co-founder in 1959 and from 1969 PLO chairman.

Arafat did not speak at the Security Council, which was and is dominated by its five veto-carrying permanent members Britain, China, France, the United States, and the USSR/Russia. Rather, he addressed the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where from the 1960s Third World states were in the majority; his speech was the first time that the UNGA allowed a non-state representative to attend its plenary session. The UNGA invited the PLO after having decided, in September, to begin separate hearings on Palestine (rather than making Palestine part of general Middle Eastern hearings), and after the PLO was internationally recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, a landmark accomplishment for the organization. The UNGA president who introduced Arafat, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1937-2021), was the Foreign Minister of Algeria, which since its independence in 1962 had supported the Palestinian cause organizationally, militarily, and politically. Arafat spoke in Arabic; the below text is the official UN English translation. Arafat did not write the text all by himself; several PLO officials and Palestinians close to the PLO, including Edward Said, assisted, as Timothy Brennan has noted in Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (2021). Later in November 1974, the UNGA inter alia decided to give the PLO observer status and affirmed Palestinians’ right to self-determination.