Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein Hardcover – December 27, 2016

John Nixon's Debriefing the president offers a must read tell all about Saddam Hussein and the war in Iraq from the perspective of a CIA analyst. This book is written as an autobiography in the first person, discussing the author's career up to and beyond the war in Iraq. Into this frame, the author inserts his discussion of Saddam Hussein and what he was really like. As a leadership analyst at the CIA, Saddam and his personality were long studied by the author. His debriefing of Saddam offered him as a historian the rare opportunity to encounter his subject of study in the flesh. The book is broken into three parts.The first part of the book discusses the author's early life and his early career as an analyst. I found this a fascinating account of all that goes into making a professional spy. The author describes the run up to the Iraq War and how the CIA provided faulty intelligence for the Bush administration who did not want to hear truth, but evidence that confirmed their own preconceived notions about Iraq. However, the narrative was somewhat tedious at times, becoming overly bogged down with data on the author's personal life. While this goes a long way to humanize the author, I bought this book to read about Saddam, not the author's wedding.The second part of the book is the real meat of the book, as you get a front row view of the interrogation of Saddam Hussein. Saddam comes across as a very traditional man devoted to Arab nationalism and secularism. With the modern decline into sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis, it is often very easy to forget that this was not always the case. Sa/ddam was proud that his predominately Sunni Ba'athist party contained Shiites, Kurds, and Christians, at least when it began. Respect and loyalty appear to have been gold under his administration, as they earned you fabulous western consumer good. However, disloyalty and disrespect were harshly punished with death. Saddam like many dictators was intensely suspicious of his inferiors, always on the look out for coups. In many ways, Saddam reminded me of Julius Caesar. Like the Roman dictator, the Iraqi dictator also seized control of a republic, replacing it with semi-monarchic rule. Both heavily emphasized their name not unlike Donald J. Trump today. Throughout the interview, Saddam appears to have talked about himself in the third person. Saddam will not tolerate this. Would Saddam do that? Both were also eager to give themselves all the glory for military accomplishments, minimizing the successes of their subordinates. At one point, Saddam even talked about how his dignity would not allow him to perform some action. Caesar famously said his dignity would not allow him to back down from the Roman civil war that ended in his dictatorship.However, we should be careful about labeling Saddam a dictator and laying on all the negative connotations this word implies. As the author notes, Saddam did not admire Hitler and Mussolini, as many have suggested in an attempt to blacken his name by associating himself with the worst of the worst of human history. He admired George Washington, Mao Zedong, Lenin, and others for founding a political system. His chief model was Saladin who destroyed the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. Intriguingly, the author also undercuts the traditional narrative that Saddam Hussein was abused as a child by his stepfather. Modern psychology has a way of looking for childhood abuse to explain violence as an adult. For example, this is often used as a vector to understand dictators such as Hitler and serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. But as the author shows, Saddam had a positive, loving relationship with his stepfather, to whom he believed he owed his later success because he encouraged the young Saddam to go to Bagdad to pursue his career. The book is full of revelations such as these.The third and final part of the book returns to the US and CIA, detailing the author's subsequent career at the CIA. The author had the rare privilege to meet and clash with President Bush on a few occasions. Nixon is heavily critical of G. W. B., whom he sees as incapable of understanding Iraq and unwilling to change his long held views of Saddam and the region. Bush and his administration seem unwilling to drop any pretense that this was a freedom mission and something of a personal vendetta. Apparently, Bush was looking for connections between Saddam and 9/11 immediately after the terrorist attacks. The CIA was only to willing to oblige the president with fictions rather than the cold truth. Saddam himself thought 9/11 should have brought the US and his regime closer together in the fight against sectarian violence. Saddam was right that this is what should have happened, but he could not understand that the president and his advisers genuinely believed that toppling Iraq would result in vibrant, American democracies throughout the Middle East. As time has proved, this vision is grossly out of touch with the realities of the Arab world.Saddam is intriguing in this regard because he had a real grasp of the Iraqi mind that Westerners lack. For example, even the author struggles with Saddam's belief that he was the leader of the Arab world, fending off the threat of Iran. Nothing could be further from the truth, but this belief is instructive. There are some in this part of the world who still for a leader of all the Arabs like the caliph once occupied. We are now witnessing the fulfillment of that mentality with ISIS and the restoration of the caliphate.The book ends with an intriguing comparison of Saddam and Bush Junior, highlighting their similarities as militarily inexperienced ideologues at the reins of government. I found the book's conclusion compelling, as the author condemns the modern western tendency to demonize dictators and view them as all powerful despots. Essentially by viewing them through the lenses of evil Hitleresque dictator, we miss important insights into them as people. As the author suggests, by the end of his regime Saddam was a non-threat who had given up on WMD and simply wanted to finish writing his book. The author also cautions against the confirmation bias of American politicians such as G.W.B. who was unwilling to listen to news that did not confirm his view of the world. This is sadly a trait inherent to politicians in our two party political system. I suspect that many a president whether democrat or republican will continue to suffer from this flaw.On the whole, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to friends interested in this subject. But I would caution readers. This is not history. Sections of the book are regrettably blacked out. The author also does not cite official documents or other testimonies in his assessment of Saddam, which could undercut his image of the Iraqi dictator. The author suggests that perhaps one day he will write a critical biography of Saddam based on testimony about his regime and official documents. I sincerely hope he does.

We in the USA are fortunate to live in one of the only several dozen countries where an honest book like this can be written and published. The book underlines what an enormous mistake the Iraq war of 2003 was, based on stubbornness, the desire to hit an ugly face, forcing the facts to fit preconceived notions and the objectives of the "neocons". Today, some 13 + years later it is remote, ancient history, but that mistake set in motion a train of events that is far from over and for which we do not take responsibility. John Nixon is right when he says that Saddam was an effective bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism in his own country, we could have lived with Saddam, however unpleasant a character, and benefited from that. The cost in US lives was horrendous, and as for Iraqi lives ever so many more, in the hundreds of thousands, and Syrian lives and displacements, in the hundreds of thousands and tens of millions respectively, we don't make the connection between our invasion in 2003 and those terrible events, and the loss of three trillion in treasure. I appreciated John Nixon, a person of inquiring mind, caught in a hierarchy where each rank looked to please the rank above it, ending with pleasing the president. The emperor had no clothes, and no one dared to say so. Our administration(s) need to understand the history and culture and ways of the peoples and nations with whom we share the globe, before acting. Having understood the culture and the history, we should reflect on what the human and economic and political landscape may look like before we act and prepare for possible outcomes in advance. The world is a complicated place with many moving parts, and to be a leader in 2017 we must understand it. Even better is to have an emperor who understands that he may have no clothes on. We may have such a real world "emperor" now in President Trump, and I for one am optimistic.