Review Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein

Nixon, John, Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016

 

John Nixon was part of a CIA team that was the first to debrief Saddam Hussein after his capture in December 2003. In Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein Nixon writes about what kind of person Saddam was, the issues he had with interviewing him, the range of topics they covered and then his criticism of how the Agency and the Bush administration dealt with the Iraq War. Nixon has a very easy writing style allowing the reader to quickly go through and digest the book. His main thesis was that the United States completely misunderstood Saddam which was part of a larger problem of never comprehending Iraq.

 

Nixon was apprehensive about talking with Saddam at first but found him very open about most things. A CIA profiler said that Saddam was a chronic liar so debriefing him would be difficult. Nixon found the opposite. He appealed to Saddam’s vanity and told him he had a chance to tell the world his side of the story about Iraq and his leadership. That didn’t mean things were always easy as Saddam could be confrontational and got angry over certain matters but overall Nixon did create a connection often by using Iraqi history as an opening and always ending sessions on a good note.

 

In just two months’ time Nixon was able to cover a plethora of issues with Saddam before the CIA was replaced by the FBI. For example Saddam said there was no sectarianism under his rule and talked about how there had been Shiites and Christians in the Baathist leadership. When Shiites were discussed however he said that he believed they could not be trusted because they were tied to Iran and always plotting against him. Saddam said he liked the Kurdish people as simple mountain folk. They probably related to Saddam’s own impoverished upbringing in rural Salahaddin. Saddam hated the Kurdish leadership however saying they were traitors and liars. This showed one of Nixon’s team's technique. They would start off talking generalities and then try to get into specifics to find out what Saddam’s true feeling were. Saddam liked to talk about his rule as being without discrimination but his comments showed he did not believe Shiites or Kurds who made up the majority of Iraq’s population were loyal.

 

One of the times Nixon had problems with Saddam was when he brought up the 1988 gassing of the Kurdish village of Halabja during the Iran-Iraq War. Nixon talked about it three times with the Iraqi president because he thought it was important since it involved WMD, a human rights abuse and could shed light on his decision making. Each time Saddam got very irritated but the CIA group was able to get him to speak on the matter. He blamed the Iraqi chief of staff General Nizar al-Khazraji for ordering the attack. Saddam was angry it happened not because WMD was used or that thousands of civilians were killed but because Halabja was under Iranian control at the time so they would be able to control the news about it which would paint Iraq in a bad light. More importantly it showed that Saddam was not the control freak everyone believed him to be. Many painted him as a totalitarian dictator often comparing him to Hitler. In fact, Nixon found Saddam delegated plenty of authority and by the time of the 2003 invasion he wasn’t even that involved in the day to day governing of his country being much more interested in writing.

 

The author found there were many other things the U.S. got wrong about Saddam. The Bush administration for example, implied that Saddam might have been involved in 9/11, had connections with Al Qaeda, and would never give up his WMD all of which proved untrue. Saddam actually felt that September 11 would bring Washington and Baghdad together because they both hated Islamic extremism. He often talked about what a threat Wahabism was to his regime. Saddam did end up destroying all his WMD in the 1990s although he lied to Nixon when he said he never tried to conceal his programs from U.N. inspectors. There was a deception committee which hid material and the extent of Iraq’s work on WMD throughout the 90s. Nixon didn’t believe Saddam understood how other countries worked and how his actions might be interpreted by others and that led to much of the mistrust between Iraq and the United States.

 

The end of Debriefing the President was all about Nixon’s criticism of the CIA and the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq. Nixon felt that CIA director George Tenet wanted to be a major player at the White House and therefore tried to give it everything it wanted on Iraq. Nixon believed that led to lots of shoddy reports being sent to the administration to satisfy their demand for intelligence on Iraq. Tenet’s hopes ultimately failed as Bush blamed the Agency for problems with Iraq like there being no WMD. The author thought the president was worse. He saw everything in black and white and never understood Iraq no matter how much he was briefed and read about it. Nixon gave reports to Bush twice on Moqtada al-Sadr for instance. Nixon tried to explain why Sadr was popular because of his father who was a famous ayatollah but Bush only saw him as a thug and dismissed anything that didn’t support that assumption. The president also stuck to his justification for the invasion such as Saddam being a threat and wanting WMD even after that was proven untrue. In the end Nixon wrote that the CIA and Bush were both responsible for Iraq with the Agency feeding a president that was set in his ways only wanted to hear what he already believed in. After the invasion the White House and CIA got into a blame game trying to hoist the failures of Iraq upon each other. Nixon’s view is more convincing that they were partners in crime.

 

John Nixon’s book is important not only for those wanting to understand Saddam Hussein, but also how the U.S. got into so much trouble in Iraq. The author said he wanted to explain the consequences of the war and he does that. He goes through the numerous ways Washington misread Iraq which led to the invasion and then how the CIA’s pandering and President Bush’s lack of understanding led to a failed occupation. It’s not the first book you would think of reading on this period in Iraqi history but it definitely should be on your list.

 

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