Gordon Carrera

You never do that.

Pretty good print run.

So that's Saddam on the eve of the war.

It's interesting.

I was in Iraq in February 2003, so just a few weeks before, but in the northern bit of Iraq, the Kurdish bit of Iraq.

And that is my memory of it.

I was not penning novels.

I was reporting for the Today program from the Kurdish part.

But I have one very vivid memory, which is I was kind of

working alongside the PUK or one of the Jalal Talabani, who was one of the kind of Kurdish leaders at the time.

And we were going to a meeting of all the Iraqi exiles at a place called Saladin in this kind of autonomous bit of Iraq, outside of Iraqi control.

And I'll never forget it because we were driving in a convoy and I was part of his convoy and we hit this kind of mountaintop and another convoy came towards us.

And out of this other convoy, it stopped, both convoys stopped, came Ahmed Chalabi.

And Chalabi came out, and Chalabi and Talabani, I remember seeing them embrace.

And it was two guys who knew, we've got the Americans to do what we've been wanting to do for years, which is get rid of Saddam.

There was this moment, this feel amongst the exiles, as they gathered for this conference at Saladin, that it was coming at last.

And for lots of those people, the anticipation was enormous because they hated Saddam.

He'd been their enemy.

He'd been this ruthless tyrant despite his novelistic career.

And he was finally going to be gone.