Saddam Hussein Unplugged

"Let me ask a direct question," Saddam Hussein said, in Arabic, at the beginning of one of his "interviews" by American interrogators in Baghdad on Feb. 13, 2004. "I want to ask where, from the beginning of this interview process until now, has the information been going? For our relationship to remain clear, I want to know." So Hussein was told: The U.S. government was doing the interviewing, and the information would likely lead back to George W. Bush.

Hussein seemed satisfied. Agreeable. Said he would have no reservations if others were "brought into" the process. He "does not mind" if the information is published. "If you decide to publish a book, be sure to write it in English as well as Arabic."

He spoke like his own publicist. He might as well have. He'll be the subject of his share of books, and in the next few days and weeks, more than his share of articles, now that the transcripts of 20 interviews and five "casual conversations" conducted with him after his capture by U.S. troops in December 2003 have been released, thanks to the always-industrious and fascinating National Security Archives at George Washington University.

"Saddam," the archives' own sum-up has it, "denied any connections to the 'zealot' Osama bin Laden, cited North Korea as his most likely ally in a crunch, and shared President George W. Bush's hostility towards the 'fanatic' Iranian mullahs, according to the FBI records of conversations from February through June 2004 between Saddam and Arabic-speaking agents in his detention cell at Baghdad International Airport."

It was for the Iranians' sake that he lied about possessing weapons of mass destruction. He feared them more than he feared the United States, so by pretending to have chemical weapons, he hoped to deter an Iranian attack.

From his last "casual conversation" with FBI agent George Piro, one of a scandalously small number of agents who spoke Arabic: "Hussein stated that he was a believer in God but was not a zealot." Hussein believed that religion and government should not mix."

Many of the interviews are searching, oral histories from Saddam Hussein's perspective of a range of matters--coups, the Palestinian-Israeli issue, wars with Israel, the Baath party in Iraq, his relationships with Syria and al-Qaeda--that will fill in his own perspective on Middle East history. But the documents are just as absorbing for the insights they allow about Saddam Hussein's mind at work, his personality, his strange mix of earnestness, clarity and delusions.

He was asked if, as often reported in the past, he had ever used doubles as security measures. "Movie magic," he called it, denying that he'd done so, except maybe when at war. But that's the thing: Iraq was in a virtual state of war for more years than not under Saddam.

"Not included in these FBI reports," the archives note, "are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds." That's too bad: no word, for instance, on the Reagan administration's strategic alliance with Saddam against Iran.

"This series of interviews also does not address chemical warfare in Kurdish areas of Iraq in 1987-1988, although an FBI progress report says Saddam was questioned on the topic. One interview, #20, is redacted in its entirety on national security grounds, although it is not clear what issues agents could have discussed with Saddam that cannot now be disclosed to the public."

But we can guess. Ronald Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld and both Bushes must be breathing a sigh of relief, the redacting pen once again proving their questionable legacies' best friend.

Read the entire set of interviews and casual conversations at the National Security Archives.

See Also:

• Iraq Casualties: From Saddam Hussein to George Bush
• Chemical Bombing of Kurds in Halabja Iraq
• A Brief History of the Iraq War
• Iraq War Timeline 1973-1993
• Iraq War Timeline 1993-2003
• Iraq War Timeline, 2003-2008