John Nixon (1)

Very honestly written memoir.
Commendable effort by the author. He didn't cater to the world by dishing out what the world believes (or wants to believe) — that Saddam Hussein was housing a stockpile of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and hence the war against Iraq was justified. Nor did the author try be sensational by portraying Saddam as paragon of virtue who was wronged. The account was balanced and very honest. I liked that section of the book where Mr.Nixon compares Saddam and Jr.Bush. He minced no words in calling out what was a jingoistic move on the part of Bush's administration to go for an all-out war.

… (plus d'informations)

In his book “Debriefing the President”, John Nixon describes his role as a CIA analyst who was sent to Iraq to debrief Saddam Hussein following his capture. Having studied Saddam Hussein for several years prior to the War in Iraq, Nixon became the CIA’s choice to interview the suspect to ensure that the man captured was in fact the Iraqi President and not a body double. The idea that Hussein maintained a cadre of body doubles to stand in for him was but one of a number of misunderstandings our Government had about the real Saddam Hussein. According to Nixon’s analyses and interview of Hussein after his capture, Saddam did not have body doubles acting for him during his presidency, had not targeted the Bush daughters for assassination, was not supporting Al Qaeda, etc., despite the widely held views to the contrary among U.S. leaders.

In hindsight, it’s not difficult to understand why Nixon describes the U.S. invasion of Iraq while the war in Afghanistan was on-going as a mistake. The Saddam Hussein that Nixon learned about in his role as CIA Iraq analyst and as the man who debriefed the Iraqi president was far from the threat against the U.S. that the neocons in the Bush Administration portrayed him to be. According to Nixon, by the time of the Iraq war, Saddam did not have an active program developing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), had no role in the 9/11 attack, and was busy spending time writing a novel, having already passed along responsibility for affairs of state to subordinates. Given the on-going turmoil in Iraq in particular as well as in the Middle East in general, and the subsequent rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Mr. Nixon makes it seem that living with Saddam Hussein in charge for several more years may have been the better choice for U.S. policy. While the title of the book is “Debriefing the President”, only part of the narrative talks about the Saddam interviews, and there really weren’t significant revelations about Saddam obtained from those talks. Hussein certainly wasn't portrayed as a benevolent dictator, but may not have been as much of a threat to our nation as described by our national leaders.

A good part of the book also discusses the workings of the CIA and its relationship with the White House. Nixon was critical of the conservatives in the Bush Administration in their single-mindedness in their focus to force Saddam out of power, despite what the CIA analysis may have shown. He was also very critical of the leadership in the CIA for being more focused on pleasing the President and his advisors, favoring analysis which supported the Presidential team’s pre-conceived notions about Iraq, and downplaying analysis which contradicted those notions. Clearly, in Nixon’s way of thinking, having a President, unfamiliar with the region, its history, its people, and its leaders, and yet being too arrogant and convinced that his own gut feelings outweigh the information of the experts in the intelligence agencies may provide, was a recipe for disaster.

The author was also disappointed in Obama’s apparent lack of interest in the CIA Iraqi analyses, and his subsequent eagerness to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible. Neither the Bush nor Obama teams used the CIA effectively, in Nixon’s estimation.… (plus d'informations)

"We tried to open up a discussion with Saddam about WMD… "Don't waste your time. There are more dangerous things than what you are looking for."" (pg. 133)

A workmanlike account of the author's time as a CIA intelligence analyst around the time of the Iraq War, being one of the first to interrogate (or 'debrief') dictator Saddam Hussein after his capture in 2003. John Nixon knows his stuff, but struggles to impart this to the reader. The complex and confusing nature of Iraq remains – in such a short book – complex and confusing, and there is little at length from the mouth of Saddam.

If we're honest, it is the dictator, and not Nixon, who we are here to hear from, but his answers to his CIA and military interrogators are often summarised rather than reproduced. Saddam, we are told, talked at length about his personal history, his appraisal of the political situation in Iraq, his view of foreign leaders and many other things besides (at one unusual moment, he professes a love for Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (pg. 100)), but we are not given much detail. Nixon calls himself a 'witness to history', but any sort of importance attached to his interviewee or his statements is lost, and the contrast to more in-depth, journalistic sparring with political figures (I'm thinking Oriana Fallaci's Interviews with History here) is marked.

Now, this may not be entirely Nixon's fault. The CIA seems to have redacted some of the material (the author, whether out of pique or because it looks cool, has left some of the blunt, black bars of redaction in the final copy) and perhaps Nixon was not able to draw as freely on his briefing notes as he would have liked. However, it also becomes clear in the book that he is not a natural storyteller (see the bland memory of being outside Baghdad's Green Zone, for example, on page 14) and, unsurprisingly for someone who churned out reports for a government bureaucracy, his writing is very dry, safe and functional, with some passages (see page 81, for example) reading like the sort of STAR-method answers you are forced to give on a civil service application form. Nixon also flits backwards and forwards in time in his recollections, not only in his own career timeline but in pre- and post-invasion Iraq, and pre- and post-Saddam capture, when greater structural integrity would have brought his thesis out more.

Despite the book's flaws, Debriefing the President is interesting to read, if for no other reason than that Nixon is addressing a shameful period of Western geopolitical history that deserves every blow it receives. The slapdash nature of the American occupation of Iraq still appals, and Nixon is rather good at conveying the factory-floor frustration at bureaucracy-led policymaking, and the dysfunctional nature of intelligence analysis in general. The image he uses to end the book – aligning Saddam's shabby basement execution with the failure of American integrity in Iraq (pg. 233) – is a particularly sobering one, and conveys an anger that made me wish Nixon had cut loose just a little more in his account. As it stands, the book is rewarding, but still seems like a missed opportunity.… (plus d'informations)

An illuminating book. While the actual interrogation of Saddam comprises only two-thirds of the book, the reader learns a lot about how CIA analysts work and how they can be pressured by an administration to report news that flatters politicians' assumptions. Yes, there is some Monday-morning quarterbacking and there are a few moments where the author seems to have been mesmerized by the Butcher of Bagdad. But these don't detract from the overall impression that sticks with the reader about the difficulty of choosing the devil you know instead of the devil you don't. Recommended.… (plus d'informations)