Books I Read (and still reading) in 2020 (Part 2) : Debriefing the President - The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein

                                                          

          

John Nixon was a senior leadership analyst with the CIA from 1998 to 2011 and this is his first book, probably only book. Seventeen years ago, in the month of December, the US military forces captured Iraqi President Saddam Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit. John Nixon was tasked to debrief the President.

You may have figured out by now that I like reading controversial stuff. I have always admired Saddam for his ability to govern a country divided by two main disciplines of Islam - Sunni and Shia. And when he was captured and hanged, the country went into turmoil that lasts till today. Saddam was portrayed as a dictator who ruled with iron fists - or did he?

Years ago when I was attending a course on leadership, as part of the course, we were given a situation and asked to choose five items from the pool of stiff that we could have access to post a plane crash in the desert. Among the items was a hand gun. The situation was that the flight we were in went down in a desert and we could each carry only 5 items as we move out of the crash site. The situation didn't make sense but yeah, it was for training purpose, so we assumed that we survived. And yes, there was a handgun - only one out of the 25 in the class chose that and we all laughed at him, big time. Then the facilitator said the damning thing - sometimes, to control a group, a leader would need the upper hand. The gun would have kept those who followed that guy in toe. When I read about the atrocities of Saddam, it did make sense. But I suppose eventually, Saddam tipped over and went beyond atrocities that humans could endure as at one point he assumed he was equivalent to the Al Mighty.

The debrief done by John Nixon somewhat opens up the world inside the head of Saddam. Many sentences in the book were blackened. So, the most raucous parts were censored. Yet, it was a good read.

One sentence in the book summarised what I wrote above - However, in hindsight, the thought of having Saddam Hussein in power seems almost comforting in comparison with the awful events and wasted effort of America’s brave young men and women in uniform, not to mention the $3 trillion and still counting we have spent to build a new Iraq. The verdict was the Americans could not rebuild Iraq.

The Americans had always portrayed Saddam as an Islamic terrorist which is a direct contrast to what he told Mr Nixon - “I told them that if they wanted to practice their religion, that would be acceptable to me. But they cannot bring the turban into politics. That I will not permit.” He referred to the Shiites. Saddam didn't mix religion and politics. I admire Saddam for his ideology on politics when he said “I am convinced from all those years since 1977—and I have written about this—that any attempt to introduce religion into government and politics will lead to insult to religion and will damage politics, and the [Ba’ath] Party went forward on this principle.” He held the stand that politics and religion should not mix.

John Nixon started the book from his arrival in Baghdad, right before Saddam was captured. It was the latter's head bodyguard,  Muhammad Ibrahim Umar al-Muslit, who pointed the finger where the fallen president was hiding.

It was after all the story about body doubles that finally the right Saddam was captured. This para brought some memories back - 'Saddam supposedly had men who looked like him and could be used to stand in for him at public gatherings, as well as confuse Western intelligence agencies that might be thinking of assassinating him. This rumor began because, to Western eyes, many of the men who guarded Saddam bore a resemblance to the Iraqi dictator. That much was true. Perhaps it was because many of Saddam’s bodyguards were members of his extended family and shared some physical traits. ' 

I think it was 1990, post leaving the university I rented a room in a single mother's house. There were 4 rooms and the last room was vacant. One day when I returned from work, I had a shock. There was this guy who looked exactly like young Saddam in that room. I froze. That was the time Saddam over ran Kuwait. He saw my confusion and quickly introduced himself. He said his name was Romeo, yup, folks, that's what he said. A native of India, he was working in a gold shop in Kuwait when Saddam came a calling. Since he looked exactly like the intruding president whom the Kuwaitis were planning to shoot on sight , Mr Romeo fled Kuwait to Malaysia.

So, after the right tip off the real Saddam was captured. Nixon was the person who was entrusted with the job of identifying the captured man - it was Saddam, with the tattoos and wounds at the right places. According to Nixon, even in captivity Saddam spoke like he was still the President. “You found me. Why don’t you go find these weapons of mass destruction?” Saddam made a mockery of George Bush and his allegations on WMD, which we all know was never found.

Nixon had put forward the biggest mistake that the US had made, not having real time knowledge on the ground about Saddam. He wrote - Even worse, the Agency missed several important developments about Saddam’s leadership. One of my colleagues wrote a paper analyzing Saddam’s novel Zabibah and the King. Her main conclusion was that the story didn’t tell us much because Saddam used ghostwriters. Iraq experts knew that Saddam wrote everything himself—his own speeches and now a novel. Yet this analyst asserted that wasn’t true because she assumed that a world leader could not possibly have the time to write a novel. Which was just the point. Having time to write it indicated he was not devoting his energies to running the government at a time when war seemed inevitable. Apparently, right before the US attacked Iraq, Saddam had sent the manuscript of his latest book to one Mr Tariq. 

If at this juncture, you feel it was the Agency (CIA) that needed to be debriefed, my thoughts are the same. These sentences summarise our matching thoughts - it occurred to me that our government had never prepared for capturing Saddam alive. U.S. officials took it as a foregone conclusion that Saddam would kill himself rather than be captured, or be killed as he tried to escape. When he was captured alive, no one knew what to do. Probably it is the American arrogance that had made the US perceive that Saddam can only be killed, not captured which portrays self-doubt and ascertain the fact that the intelligence folks did not have strong source of information on the ground.

Saddam was a dictator who killed scores of people but John Nixon had also shown us the other side of him - "He put his hand over his heart and said, “I would like you to know that I have really enjoyed this. It has been months since I talked with anyone. It has been so long since I have been able to have a meaningful conversation and I look forward to our next meeting.”  Any human would seek opportunities to communicate, two way communication, not just bark orders. Saddam was just human, may be with some inhuman traits, but basically a human with his own objectives and expectations.

John Nixon wrote - He did have a sense of humor, which he would put on display when he felt like diverting our questions. From time to time Saddam would tell us funny anecdotes culled from his experiences leading Iraq. He told us of a time during the 1990s when he went to Lake Habbaniya for a meeting but didn’t bring his usual redundant circles of security with him, instead bringing only a few bodyguards. Soon he was enveloped by a crowd of well-wishers chanting his name. The crowd swelled as word spread that Saddam was in town, and soon his bodyguards were overwhelmed. At one point a guard threw a young boy to the ground as Saddam made his way to the waiting car. Saddam saw this, saw the boy pick up a stick, and then winked at the boy. Saddam called the guard’s name, and when he turned to face Saddam, he got whacked on the side of the head with the stick—the boy’s revenge for being thrown to the ground.

Contrary to what the West thought, Saddam's greatest enemy was Iran, not of the West. But it was the West that destroyed his country and him. “There were 548 acts of war committed against Iraq prior to the war,” Saddam said, and remembered each one of them. Such was his hatred for the Shiites who governed Iran. "We didn’t take any action against Iran until they did something first. We returned everything in equal measure.”

Another thing that stood out about Saddam was how he handled his son Uday who accumulated garage full of luxury cars - Saddam told me he was proud of Uday and Qusay, but realistic about their shortcomings. He sometimes found it necessary to punish them. Uday was a particular problem for him. He said he was incensed when he learned that Uday kept a fleet of Bentleys, Jaguars, and Mercedeses in a garage in Baghdad that was protected by Republican Guard soldiers. “What kind of message are we sending to the Iraqi people, who must suffer under sanctions and do without?” So Saddam had the cars torched. The only time that Saddam ever showed any emotion during the time I talked to him was when we discussed his daughters, Rana and Raghid. His eyes became watery and his voice quivered momentarily. He would say only, “I miss them terribly. I enjoyed a wonderful relationship with them. They loved me very much, and I loved them very much.”

Saddam Hussein, despite the notoriety, was just a father who did his best with his children, the way he thought he did the best for Iraq.

He dealt with his relatives the same way - Saddam told us how one day word reached him that Watban’s motorcade had been driving through Baghdad, and the president’s half brother had become impatient with the traffic light. Watban got out of his government car, drew his revolver, shot out the light, and went on his way. Saddam summoned Watban to the palace for a meeting. Saddam said to Watban that he had heard of an accident and asked if this was true. Saddam seemed to enjoy telling us about Watban’s extreme discomfort when rehashing the details. Watban also admitted that his car had hit a pedestrian. Saddam said that he could not have this kind of activity in his country. This was a republic where the people ruled. So he sentenced Watban to direct traffic for two months in the traffic circle in Baghdad where the incident took place. Notorious but with a sense of humour, I would say.

The book describes all the discussions between the captive and his interrogators, but one thing stood out at the end - Saddam's prediction.

Nixon wrote: Watching the grainy cell phone images being taped by Maliki’s national security adviser, Muaffaq al-Rubai, I was struck that Saddam looked like the most dignified person in the room. He handled the occasion as I expected he would—defiant and unafraid to the end. It was a rushed execution in a dark basement in Baghdad. For me, the final pillar justifying Operation Iraqi Freedom had collapsed. Saddam was not a likable guy. The more you got to know him, the less you liked him. He had committed horrible crimes against humanity. But we had come to Iraq saying that we would make things better. We would bring democracy and the rule of law. No longer would people be awakened by a threatening knock on the door. And here we were, allowing Saddam to be hanged in the middle of the night. The US failed in Iraq just like Saddam's prediction.

“You are going to fail,” Saddam said. “You are going to find that it is not so easy to govern Iraq. You are going to fail in Iraq because you do not know the language, the history, and you do not understand the Arab mind.” The Americans never did and they still don't.