Debriefing the President

What Saddam told John Nixon during the conversations he had with him after his capture in late 2003 and early 2004 was to make Washington policymakers very unhappy. He convincingly rebutted the justifications used by the Bush administration for going to war.

Were people ready to listen to this information? Even if they listened, did they hear? At the start of the debriefings, Nixon felt he knew Saddam. But in the ensuing weeks, he learned that the West had vastly misunderstood both him and his role as a determined foe of radical currents in the Islamic world, including Sunni extremism. And this was to prove a very expensive mistake indeed.