Gordon Carrera

But of course, Saddam is then put on trial and he's handed over to the new Iraqi government that takes over and it doesn't end well for him.

It is because it's filmed on a kind of grainy mobile phone footage almost, isn't it?

And they're shouting abuse at him as he's hung, the people who are doing it.

It's really weird, isn't it?

No, go on.

That is wild.

I think that's really important because that sense in which he's detached from reality, which I think we've got through talking about him, explains some of the weird decisions he takes, some of the weird statements he makes.

It's so interesting because there's a

he gets debriefed by both CIA and FBI.

And you can read accounts of this as a book, Debriefing the President by John Nixon, where John Nixon, who'd been a CIA leadership analyst studying Saddam, gets to go meet him and debrief him over his time in captivity.

And so that's how we know all this stuff about Revolutionary Command Council meetings, because he and others talk about what was really going on at the time.

And it is fascinating to just

be able to piece together what was going on in his head and how he wasn't quite the leader that people thought he was, which isn't to say he wasn't a murderous tyrant, but just more detached from reality.

And of course, while they were hunting for Saddam in 2003, the occupation of Iraq turns into a disaster very quickly.

I remember Iraqi exiles telling me it'll only take two weeks for the Americans to be seen as occupiers, and they were pretty much right.

There was no plan for the aftermath.

It's a shocking part of it.

So you get looting, you get the decision to disband the Iraqi army, leaves lots of angry men with guns.

I remember an Iraqi source telling me, well, there's lots of jihadists coming over the border from other Middle East countries to fight you Americans.

I remember asking a British intelligence source about this and going, oh, we haven't heard about that.