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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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.