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But the participant has at least one vital contribution to make to the writing of history: He will know which one of the myriad of possible considerations in fact influenced the decisions in which he was involved; he will be aware of which documents reflect the reality as he perceived it; he will be able to recall what views were taken seriously, which were rejected, and the reasoning behind the choices made . . . If done with detachment, a participant’s memoir may help future historians judge how things really appeared, even (and perhaps especially) when in the fullness of time more evidence becomes available about all dimensions of the events.
—Henry Kissinger, White House Years, 1979
The rise of Islamic extremism in Iraq, chiefly under the rubric of ISIS (or Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham), is a catastrophe that the United States needn’t have faced had it been willing to live with an aging and disengaged Saddam Hussein. I do not wish to imply that Saddam was innocent of the charges that were thrown at him over the years. He was a ruthless dictator who, at times, made decisions that plunged his region into chaos and bloodshed. 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.
In December 2003 and January 2004, I was the first American to conduct a prolonged interrogation of Saddam Hussein after his capture by U.S. forces. I was a senior CIA leadership analyst who had spent the previous five years studying Iraq and Iran. At the start of the debriefings, I felt I knew Saddam. But in the ensuing weeks, I learned that the United States had vastly misunderstood both him and his role as a determined foe of radical currents in the Islamic world, including Sunni extremism.
Ironically, while American neocons tried their best to link Saddam to 9/11 and al-Qaeda, Saddam thought that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would move the United States closer to his Ba’athist regime. In Saddam’s mind, the two countries were natural allies in the fight against extremism and, as he said many times during his interrogation, he couldn’t understand why the United States did not see eye to eye with him. Saddam was a Sunni himself, his Ba’ath Party stood for Arab nationalism and socialism, and he saw Sunni extremism as a threat to his power base. Saddam portrayed himself as utterly fearless, but to my surprise, he told me he feared the rise of extremism in his country. He knew how difficult it would be to use his mostly Sunni apparatus of repression to fight an enemy whose galvanizing principle was Sunni fundamentalism.
The Israeli scholar Amatzia Baram has observed that Saddam was always aware of the danger of a competing elite, regardless of its religious or secular sympathies. Saddam believed that there could be only one leader and said, “You must understand: Iraqis are always plotting against you—especially the Shia!” If you look at Iraqi history since the fall of its monarchy in 1958, you would have to concede that Saddam had a point. Iraqi politics has been beset by rival factions that have often been at each other’s throats. Saddam was often mischaracterized as a nonbeliever or as someone who used religion clumsily to promote his own political goals. Actually, he was not hostile to religion per se; he just demanded that he be allowed to control whatever religious activity there was in Iraq. Saddam was a believer, but—and this is a crucial distinction—on his own terms. In 1991, after the Gulf War, he brought religion and religious symbols more and more into Iraq’s public life.
But Saddam’s religious tolerance had clear limits. As he said to me during his debriefing, “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.” Saddam was talking about Shiites, although his injunction applied to Sunni fundamentalists too. In this case, he was referring specifically to Shia religious leaders such as Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr and Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who had chosen to oppose Saddam and threatened his regime with a potential Islamic revolution similar to the one that had overthrown the shah in Iran in 1979. He had both of them killed.
One of the most consequential developments of the past twenty years has been the spread of Wahhabist ideology in the Gulf Arab nations. Wahhabism emanates from Saudi Arabia and seeks to return the faithful to a more austere form of Islam similar to what existed during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Saddam’s understanding of the threat of Wahhabism and his views on the threat of Iranian-inspired terrorism and Iran’s ties to Iraqi Shia extremists were particularly cogent and visionary. He saw Iraq as the first line of Arab defense against the Persians of Iran and as a Sunni bulwark against its overwhelmingly Shia population.
However, by the 1990s, Saddam began to see the spread of Wahhabism into Iraq and began hearing about Wahhabist cells being created in his country. During our debriefing of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam said presciently, “Wahhabism is going to spread in the Arab nation and probably faster than anyone expects. And the reason why is that people will view Wahhabism as an idea and a struggle . . . Iraq will be a battlefield for anyone who wants to carry arms against America. And now there is an actual battlefield for a face-to-face confrontation.”*
Saddam’s removal created a power vacuum that turned religious differences in Iraq into a sectarian bloodbath. For a time, Shiites turned the other cheek to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Sunni-led atrocities, hoping to win power at the ballot box. But as the death toll rose, Shiite militias joined the fight.
In December 2010, the democratic uprisings known as the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, and in 2011 spread to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Then came the Arab Winter, with a military coup in Egypt and civil wars in Libya, Yemen, and, most consequentially, Syria.
The civil war in Syria began in March 2011 when President Bashar al-Assad ordered military crackdowns on protests against his authoritarian regime. At first the government was opposed by “moderate” Sunni rebels. They were joined a year later by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which was more militant but nothing close to what we would see with ISIS. (Sunnis make up three-quarters of the Syrian population, while Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, represents no more than 10 percent.) By the end of 2013, the conflict had attracted units of al-Qaeda and ISIS fighters, which split in February 2014 over questions of tactics and leadership. ISIS proclaimed its “caliphate” five months later, using videos of beheadings and mass executions—the pornography of violence—to attract thousands of new recruits from the Middle East and the West. The rest is grim history: hundreds of thousands of dead in Syria, half its population of seventeen million displaced, the annexation of large swaths of Iraq and Syria by the ISIS caliphate, and the spread of a multisided war that has drawn in the United States, Turkey, the Iranian-backed Shia militia Hezbollah, and, perhaps most significantly, Russia.
Whether this chain of events would have taken place if Saddam, and possibly his successor, had remained in power is in the realm of counterfactual speculation. Certainly his army would have remained intact, so many of his top officers would not have defected to ISIS and given the jihadists crucial military expertise. He would have used force to keep a lid on sectarian tensions in Iraq. So it could be plausibly argued that, without the U.S. invasion, the Arab world would have remained calm but frustrated under the thumbs of dictators in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Libya.
For years, Saddam covertly supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. Did he do this because they espoused principles that he shared? Not really. Saddam did this because the Brotherhood opposed Assad, his rival for leadership of the Ba’athist movement. If Brotherhood operatives had tried to lead an uprising against Saddam, he would have quickly moved to crush them.
Saddam was not an intellectual, and he was not someone who understood the larger world. He was especially perplexed by the United States, which he regarded as his chief tormentor. And, in a bizarre way, who could blame him? The U.S. government was strikingly inconsistent in its attitude toward Saddam, supporting him in the Iran-Iraq War and opposing him in the Gulf War and the Iraq War. This inconsistency was perhaps a key factor pushing Saddam into a series of missteps that eventually placed him on Washington’s “must remove” list by the time George W. Bush’s administration came into office in 2001. I don’t say this to absolve Saddam of blame. Saddam was capable of making mistakes on his own, and when it came to diplomacy or military action, he made some whoppers.
The ancient Greeks understood that when the gods wished to punish you, they gave you your most desired wish. From 1990 to 2003 Washington worked to undermine and destroy Saddam without understanding the potential consequences. We had a poor grasp of how Saddam looked at the world and how he kept in check the smoldering political undercurrents in Iraq. These lacunae eventually came back to haunt the United States during the war and the subsequent occupation of Iraq. Indeed, our lack of understanding reflected a serious flaw in U.S. foreign policy that has plagued us since our founding. The United States usually reacts blindly to threats, whether communism or an Arab strongman, without pragmatically assessing the advantages of engagement and realpolitik. Our leaders seem unable to put themselves in the shoes of foreign leaders, particularly authoritarians.
In 2009, in the first year of the Obama administration, I began reading a book making the rounds in Washington called Lessons in Disaster, a fascinating account of McGeorge Bundy’s evolving views on America’s intervention in Vietnam. It was especially relevant because it appeared just as President Obama was deciding to approve a surge of troops to Afghanistan. I had an added incentive to read it: Bundy was a professor of mine in graduate school and a man I deeply admired. He was a man unafraid to change his mind. Once a hawkish defender of U.S. military actions as national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he evolved over forty years into a staunch critic of the sloppy thinking that had led us into Vietnam. I was inspired by Bundy’s unsparing honesty. Looking back at my thirteen years at the CIA, as a senior analyst at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and during eight stints on the ground in Iraq, I noticed a similar evolution in my own views. I was astonished by how much I had revised my early thinking, and I saw clearly some of the errors the United States made in pursuing a war of choice in Iraq when we knew so little about its political and sectarian arrangements.
Saddam had risen to the heights of Iraqi power through sheer will, political acumen, and no small measure of cunning and deceit. Yet he was an ignorant man in some respects, a product of an impoverished youth and a lack of formal education. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and launched a war against Iran that took as many as seven hundred thousand lives, one hundred thousand of them civilians. He had used chemical weapons without compunction and deserved the sobriquet “Butcher of Baghdad.” Yet he was more complex than he seemed on the surface. It is vital that we know who this man was and what motivated him. We will surely see his likes again in that part of the world.
We try to construct history piece by piece, but we can never say definitively that we have put together a full and coherent story. Remembering and reconstructing events is a painstaking process. Some of the people who played roles deposing Saddam have come forward to tell their stories. But the historical record is far from complete. It is missing, most conspicuously, what Saddam was like in person and what he had to say in the several months after he was captured on December 13, 2003. Because I was with him during that time, and because I had spent years analyzing his leadership, I will try to fill in the gaps as best I can. I hope to help future historians strip away the mythology surrounding this complex man.
People often ask me, “What was Saddam like?” and “Was he crazy?” During the time I talked to Saddam Hussein, I found him to be quite sane. There were any number of genocidal psychopaths around the world, and it was curious that we decided to go after him, especially given the consequences. It is my contention that the U.S. government never gave a thought to what the Middle East would be like without Saddam. Sure, we had heard all the horror stories—the killing of one hundred thousand Shiites in the south and almost as many Kurds in the north after the Gulf War, the use of chemical weapons against Iraqis he saw as political threats, the slaughter of the Iran-Iraq War—but we never integrated these bloody acts with his hugely important role in the neighborhood. We understood this only when he was gone.
When I returned from Iraq in 2004 after my meetings with Saddam, many of my fellow analysts wanted to know what my team learned from him. A few skeptics thought it was all a waste of time. The truth is, we found out a lot about how Saddam ruled and why he did some of the things he did. We also learned a lot of things about the issues that have been used to justify the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of his regime. The most important question—“Should we have removed Saddam from power?”—was never asked or answered. The policymakers at the White House and the leadership on the seventh floor at the CIA didn’t want to hear that many of the reasons for going after Saddam were based on false premises. I made repeated attempts to write some version of this story for the CIA’s internal use but was met with what can be described only as feigned interest and an attitude of “This is not what we do.”
Richard Haass was director of policy planning at the State Department at the time of the Iraq invasion and subsequently became president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He told the journalist George Packer that he never knew why the United States went to war and described the decision as “something that just happened.” In his own memoir of the war, War of Necessity, War of Choice, Haass describes the three distinct phases of the conflict: first, the policy debate that usually precedes fighting; second, the actual fighting itself; and third, the struggle over the differing interpretations of what the war accomplished and what it all meant. This book represents my contribution to the third part of Haass’s analysis. Most of what is said in these pages is based on what I learned during my interrogation of Saddam.
Finally, there is Saddam Hussein himself. He was clearly a threat to U.S. interests in a part of the world that our government defined as vital. He took a proud and very advanced society and ground it into the dirt through his misrule. In the later stages of his rule, he became obsessed with his place in history and was scarcely engaged in foreign affairs. He seemed to want to compensate for his humble beginnings. In many respects, he was similar to the retiree who loves to watch the History Channel. He was fascinated by history but lacked the intellect to learn its lessons. Foreign policy decision-making increasingly passed into the hands of hard-liners like Iraqi vice president Taha Yasin Ramadan, RCC vice chair Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, and former foreign minister Tariq Aziz. Unimaginative and combative, Ramadan and his circle repeatedly missed opportunities to break Iraq’s international isolation. More and more, Saddam was concerned with internal security and his leisure pursuits. In captivity, he would often refer to himself as the president of Iraq, but secondly he would say he was a “writer.” That made it very hard to square the latter-day Saddam with his earlier persona as the Butcher of Baghdad.