CIA analyst: Saddam warned governing Iraq is tough

A CIA analyst, John Nixon, who confirmed the identity of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein immediately after he was captured by the US soldiers on 13 December 2003, said that the late Iraqi leader warned the US of the difficulty of ruling his country, New York Daily News reported on Saturday.

In a review of a book authored by Nixon, the American newspaper presented extracts and quotes for Nixon, who described Saddam Hussein as being difficult during the interrogation, but proved he was not preparing for any attacks on neighbouring countries or even the US.

“Saddam appeared to be as clueless about what was happening inside Iraq as his British and Americans enemies were,” writes Nixon. New York Daily News reported that Saddam pointed out that, since Iraq was not in possession of any WMDs, he posed no threat to any enemy nation.

According to the US rag, Saddam insisted he had never plotted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush, and stopped even viewing him as an adversary once he was defeated in the US elections by Bill Clinton in 1992.

Regarding his time in US custody, Nixon said “Saddam was busy writing novels…he was no longer running the government.”

At one point in the investigation, Nixon reported Saddam as predicting: “You [the West] are going to fail. You are going to find it is not so easy to govern Iraq.”

Describing the last minutes when Saddam Hussein was led to the scaffold, Nixon wrote: “I was struck that Saddam looked like the most dignified person in the room. This is not what our young men and women were dying for. This is not what President Bush had promised a new Iraq would be.”