Gordon Carrera

So it's an interesting start to the war.

What is Saddam doing though?

It's so interesting because until close to the end, I think Saddam is not convinced the US are actually going to do it.

He thinks that they're bluffing.

As we'd said, he's not prepared very much because he's been spending more and more time in his last few years not running the Iraqi government, but really focusing on his new career path as what else but a novelist.

I mean, if only it was a few years later, he could have had a podcast as well.

But at this point, it's just the novelist path that he's going down.

Oh.

But he's writing his latest novel, isn't he?

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.