Ten years after the execution of Saddam Hussein, the former dictator of Iraq, John Nixon, the CIA agent who first interrogated the tyrant immediately after his capture by U.S. forces, has written about the eye-opening experience.
If President Barack Obama was unaware of the agent’s story before he announced his plans for Iraq after winning the 2008 election, he very likely had access to it before implementing that plan. That is a disturbing point to consider after seeing the rise of ISIS and its impact on the American people in the years that have followed.
Nixon wrote, in part:
Saddam had actually believed 9/11 would bring Iraq and America closer because Washington would need his secular government to help fight fundamentalism. How woefully wrong he had been.
During our talks, we often heard muffled explosions. Saddam inferred things were not going well for the U.S. forces and took pleasure in the fact. “You are going to fail,” he said. “You are going to find that it is not so easy to govern Iraq.” History has proved him right. But back then, I was curious why he felt that way.
“Because you do not know the language, the history and the Arab mind,” he said. ‘It’s hard to know the Iraqi people without knowing its weather and its history. The difference is between night and day and winter and summer. That’s why they say the Iraqis are hard-headed—because of the summer heat.”
He chuckled and added: “Next summer, when it is hot, they might revolt against you. The summer of 1958 got a little hot. In the 1960s, when it was hot, we had a revolution. You might tell that to President Bush!”
Click here to read the entire article, published by the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail newspaper. {eoa}
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