The article is based on a book by John Nixon’s – ‘Debriefing The President’ , it busts many myths around Saddam Hussein and a needless war.
One does not often get to read about the interrogation of a former leader of a country by an agent of another country’s intelligence agency. Normally, high-value targets prefer to avoid capture for reasons of honour.
America was not expecting anything less from Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi strongman who ruled his country with an iron fist for 24 years. His capture was a surprise to Washington when they found him hiding in a hole in an unassuming compound near his hometown Tikrit.
What kind of a man was Saddam? What motivated him? What was his worldview? Who were his inspirations? How did he manage to rule a highly complex country like Iraq for decades? Though the Americans had their own theories, they were about to find out how wrong they were about him.
As per procedure, the interrogations, or what Americans euphemistically call “debriefings”, began soon after he was captured. Nixon, the first analyst to have a proper crack at the Arab leader has penned a comprehensive account of his interactions in Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein (Henceforth, DTP).
Before going to Iraq, Nixon had studied Saddam for five years as a part of his assignment on the Iraq desk in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It was he who officially confirmed the identity of the detainee by looking at tribal tattoo markings, a gun wound and a brief initial round of questions that only Saddam himself could answer. Nixon was surprised how easily Saddam had made himself comfortable to his new surroundings, even offering to teach some politics to Nixon! Saddam seemed hurt at how the US soldiers had physically abused him, one going as far as punching him for “9/11”. He also accused them of stealing money that was in his possession at the time of the raid.
DTP’s importance can be gauged from the fact that the author’s own caricature of the man changed as he went through the process of debriefing. The one constant irritation throughout the book is the black bars, or redactions applied by the CIA as a condition of publication. All employees of the agency are required to submit their manuscripts to the agency’s publication board so that no classified information is inadvertently published. Despite this small annoyance, one wouldn’t feel one is missing out on anything important.
Nixon does not spare anyone for the quagmire in Iraq, from the Bush administration to his own agency which he says was a “willing conspirator” and “slavishly sought to do the President’s bidding—as it usually does—in an effort to get a seat near the centre of power and justify its budget.”
Where did the US go wrong? Nixon says the US had “vastly misunderstood” Saddam Hussein. Far from being a conspirator in the 9/11 attacks as the Bush administration accused him of, Saddam had actually thought that the attacks would bring the two countries closer. In fact, during the debriefings, Saddam went as far as to call Iraq and the US “natural allies” in the fight against extremism and that he “couldn’t understand why the United States didn’t see eye to eye” with him.
Nixon found that Saddam had removed himself from the day to day business of governance and his top aides handled major foreign policy decisions. Saddam fancied himself a writer and was busy writing novels. If the US knew such details, a different course of action might have been charted.
Unexpectedly, the questions about the human rights violations that took place under his watch rattled Saddam. When pressed to reveal his role in the genocide of 5,000 Kurds in Halabja in 1988 where chemical weapons were used, he categorically denied that he “ma(de) that decision”. Nixon writes that Saddam first came to know of the attack from his brother-in-law and he had apparently “ceded control of chemical weapons to his local commanders”. On more than one occasion, Saddam professed his love for Kurds to Nixon and the Halabja incident really seemed to unsettle him. Nonetheless, he would not accept guilt or show remorse. More than the genocide, the fact that the Iranians used it as propaganda against Iraq troubled him.
Regarding the atrocities on minorities, there seemed a method to Saddam’s madness. The dictator justified such methods as necessary to rule a country like Iraq which required a delicate balancing of alliances and pleasing his Sunni support base.
Since the 1950s, Arab nationalists have been fearful of the seductive message of Islamists on the impoverished masses as well as the influence of communists in their local polities. Saddam reiterated these fears to Nixon, arguing that his brand of secular Arab nationalism was required to keep the clerics—who happened to be America’s enemies as well—under foot. He was concerned about creeping Wahhabism in Iraq and predicted that it “will spread faster than anyone expects” and “Iraq will be a battlefield for anyone who wants to carry arms against America”. He was right.
The American justification for war—Saddam’s alleged programme to manufacture weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—turned out to be a hoax. When asked about Iraq’s interest in WMDs, Saddam told his captors to face the fact that Americans were “ignorant hooligans…bent on (Iraq’s) destruction”. Nixon postulates that the Iraq war was waged for “highly personal reasons”, the misguided belief that Saddam tried to assassinate George W. Bush’s father and 41st US president, George Herbert Walker Bush. The administration also believed that Saddam was plotting to kill the junior Bush’s daughters as retribution for American forces killing his sons Uday and Kusay Hussein. However, Nixon tells us that this was hardly possible as Saddam could barely get reception on his radio while in hiding.
There was so much misunderstanding, genuine as well as irrational, that fuelled America’s misadventure in Iraq. Intelligence from the ground, or “humint” was so poor that agents did not even know what leaders Saddam admired, let alone get a track on his WMDs. They would liken him to Hitler and Stalin, but as Saddam later admitted to Nixon, he didn’t even like Stalin! Charles De Gaulle, Tito, George Washington and Nehru were some of the leaders Saddam looked up to. Though inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, this shows the US didn’t know what it was doing. What only mattered to Bush was capturing Saddam. There was near contempt for intelligence that went against the rigidly held views of the administration. Like a typical career bureaucratic set-up, the CIA analysts invested more in their promotions than the truth, and gave what upper echelons of power wanted to hear. Those who didn’t, found themselves out of favour quickly and were transferred.
The book busts many myths around Saddam. Apparently, there were no body doubles of him. When Saddam was asked about this, he laughed at the naivete of his conquerors. Their president himself was the epitome of ignorance. Nixon, however, defends his commander in chief, attesting that Bush was intelligent, read a lot and was very sharp in recalling information and events—it’s just that he had trouble processing the information properly. One anecdote from the book would suffice to mark the dangerous level of Bush’s ignorance. When a senior analyst explained to Bush the history of schism between Shias and Sunnis, confused, he shot back. “Wait, I thought, you said they were all Muslims?”
In Nixon’s account, Bush comes off as simple, reflexive, and with a short attention span. “Either with us or against us”, Nixon says wasn’t just a declaration by Bush as a frustration in response to 9/11, that’s how he thought, in black and white unlike his father who, having led the CIA in the 1970s, understood what the role of the agency should be and that there are many shades of grey in analysis and intelligence.
Nixon laments that when it comes to foreign affairs, “the United States is constantly reinventing the wheel by quickly forgetting the lessons learned from the last war”. That’s why Nixon’s book is important to learn the lessons from past mistakes.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.