![]() Iraq had become a volatile mix of violence, a growing insurgency hostile to the U.S., a brewing sectarian war. RENEE MONTAGNE, BYLINE: The trial of Saddam Hussein opened today in Baghdad.ĪMOS: That chaos was the backdrop for Saddam's trial two years after his regime was toppled, seeping into the judicial process that was supposed to be a model. Except there was because we did not think about Monday morning. Of course, we can remove Saddam with no problem. You know, we are the superpower, the only superpower. They had planned to go to war way back, right after 9/11. He had warned the White House in his briefings.ĮMILE NAKHLE: In the end, they did not listen, really. HUSSEIN IBISH: I don't think it's possible to understand the willingness of so many people to go along with the fantasy of reconstructing Iraq without the anger of 9/11, the sense that we have to do something really big in the Islamic and in the Arab world, and this is something.ĪMOS: At the CIA, intelligence officer Emile Nakhle, a Middle East specialist, was alarmed by the growing chaos. As important - an announcement that Saddam would face justice in an impartial Iraqi court, a step towards the rule of law, as Washington promised, creating a new democratic Iraq, a flawed project from the start, says political analyst Hussein Ibish. RICARDO SANCHEZ: This is Saddam as he was being given his medical examination today.ĪMOS: In Baghdad, American officials announced Saddam's capture. Regime change is a rationale for the U.S. Saddam Hussein is dragged out of a hole in the ground near Tikrit, his hometown. PAUL BREMER: Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.ĭEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: December 2003. NPR's Deborah Amos reports on how it went wrong. When the U.S invaded Iraq two decades ago this week, it captured Saddam and set up a trial that was supposed to exemplify justice. He didn't, though he had used them against his own people years earlier. The White House said he had weapons of mass destruction. may have influenced his decision to invade Kuwait in 1990, which precipitated the first Gulf War.Twenty years ago, many Americans thought of one man when they heard the word Iraq, and that was Saddam Hussein. Brands has written that Hussein’s distrust of the U.S. operatives were trying to assassinate him. tacitly supported Iraq’s war with Iran, Hussein believed U.S. The enemy of an enemy is not always a friend. ![]() Only Hussein’s deputy prime minister and close ally Tariq Aziz, a Christian who had spent time in the West, was able to push back against Hussein, and even he knew his limits, Brands says.Ĥ. When disagreeing with the boss can get you executed, disagreements tend to disappear. ![]() But when you look inside the machine, you realize it’s not the case,” says Brands.ģ. “From the outside, it seems like a finely oiled machine. There’s no “fun” in “dysfunctional.” As with many dictatorships, Hussein’s regime was messier and more prone to pathology than it appeared from afar. One highlight: a belief that the Japanese Pokémon cartoons were a secret Mossad plot to spread pro-Jewish messages to Iraqi youth.Ģ. Hussein’s papers reveal a regime-wide obsession with conspiracy theories, with the most off-thewall centering on Israel. The institute opened the papers to researchers in 2010, and several papers by Brands’ team have been published recently, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the authoritarian regime.ġ. Before arriving at Duke in July 2010 as an assistant professor of public policy, Hal Brands had been sifting through documents captured after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq for the Institute for Defense Analyses. ![]()
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