Amatzia Baram is Professor Emeritus at the University of Haifa. He was awarded the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1986 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His dissertation focused of Ba’thi Iraq and Saddam Husayn. Baram taught at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and Georgetown University in Washington, DC. At the University of Haifa he served as Head of the Department of Middle Eas

t Studies, Head of the Jewish-Arab Center and the Middle East Institute, founder and the first Head of the Center for Iraq-studies, co-founder and the first Head of the Meir Ezri Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies. Baram was a senior resident fellow in a few international research centers, among them the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, three years at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, two years at the US Institute of Peace, and he was Senior Associate Member at Saint Antony’s College, Oxford, UK. Since 1986 Baram was advising the US administrations of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama. Baram’s first book was Culture, History, and Ideology in the Formation of Ba’thist Iraq (Oxford, London NY, St. Antony’s College, MacMillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1991). His latest one is Saddam Husayn and Islam: Ba’thi Iraq From Secularism to Faith (Washington, DC, Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). In that book Baram used extensively Saddam’s recordings of his secret conversations 1979-2003 found in the Pentagon’s archive.