Saddam, the FBI and Cliocide in Iraq
Joyce Battle (with help from Brendan McQuade) has posted twenty interviews of Saddam Hussein by the FBI to the National Security Archives at George Washington University, having done the hard work of FOIAing them.
In this pdf file, the FBI interrogator asks a lot of leading questions about al-Qaeda and Saddam shoots them down effectively.
In this pdf file, Saddam explains, "Hussein stated Iran was Iraq's major threat due to their common border and believed Iran intended to annex Southern Iraq into Iran. The possibility of Iran trying to annex a portion of Southern Iraq was viewed by Hussein and Iraq as the most significant threat facing Iraq. hussein viewed the other countries in the Middle East as weak and could not defend themselves or Iraq from a attack from Iran. Hussein stated he believed Israel was a threat to the entire Arab world, not specifically Iraq."
Aljazeera English reports on Saddam Hussein's fear of Iran (the reason he did not publicly admit to having destroyed his chemical and biological weapons), his distaste for al-Qaeda, and his toying with a new alliance with the US against Iran.
As a professional historian of the Middle East, I am appalled by these documents. They are very odd because the agenda for the interviews was clearly set by Cheney and they were intended to justify the Bush administration. The historical questions are naive and elicit no interesting new information. I can't think of anything in the documents that couldn't just have been found in Saddam's old speeches. And the blanked-out document is very suspicious; presumably the answers there reflected poorly on Bush or Washington or something.
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and a mass murderer. But to have him so shoddily and self-interestedly debriefed and then lynched by the Mahdi Army was a great disservice to history. It is the sort of thing we came to expect from the Bush administration, which oversaw the destruction of the entire twentieth-century historical record for Iraq, as well as crushing and destroying under tanks and helicopters entire libraries of ancient Iraqi civilization, a crime I have dubbed "cliocide."
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/03/2009 01:02:00 AM
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7 Comments:
Looking forward to future amplifications of the last 33 words. PHIL :)
the blank portions include Saddam mentioning some of the history of his dealings with the US government in.. shall we say.. less flattering vocabulary..
~Saif
Saddam was convinced that the US would reinstall him "to save Iraq". This belief could only have come from his American handlers, and explains his anti-Iran, pro-US statements.
He was just telling his handlers what they wanted to hear.
Saddam Hussein's fate was that of any witness to criminal activity, dead men tell no tales, just like in the movies.
...and they got away with it!
It's a sign of just how completely Bush, Cheney & Co. turned the world on its head that American interrogators ask loaded & simplistic questions, the U.S. government engages in the suppression and outright distruction of the historical record, while a brutal dictator answers (from a point of view very different from our own in many ways, for sure) forthrightly. The Bush reign of error is a textbook example of how to turn your strengths into weaknesses. I read recently a commentary (I don't remember now by whom--possibly Paul Krugman) about the opportunity costs represented by 8 years of Bush. We can add this stuff to the list. God knows how long it will take to undo all this.
Cliocide : “Clio was the Greek muse whose task was to watch over the course of human history, a comforting figure of the ancient past assuring western man this his noble compulsion to record what happened in their political structures and events gave him power and unique survival ability for life on earth. If nothing else, at least a detailed recorded history could stand as a testament to honorable faith and accomplishment, a worthy screed of who we are, what we tried to do and what actually happened. The United States has committed "cliocide" in Iraq: All of the recorded history for Iraq for the 20th century, all of it, has been completely lost in a mayhem of looting, destruction and fire. Everything the Iraqis have done and recorded since the Ottoman Empire, since the British took over and left, since the CIA gutted their Democracy with a coup in the 1950's — obliterated, and lost forever.”
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