"I do not think the rise of an organisation like ISIS would be possible under Saddam. Yes, he was distracted by other pursuits near the end, but he very rarely took his eye off of regime security.
He did many things poorly, but he kept a tight lid on threats from religious extremists. You would not see the spread of Iranian influence throughout the region the way it has recently. Saddam's Iraq was the greatest hedge against Iran. When we removed him, we did Iran a big favor."
"He was also the most suspicious and secretive person I ever met. This made the interrogation so hard because you always felt he was lying."
"Saddam came across to the soldiers as a more complicated individual than he was often assumed to be in the West,"
"While he was most certainly guilty of countless crimes against humanity, he was more than the one-dimensional, almost cartoonish villain he was sometimes depicted as."
"Because he assumed that the US would see that America and Iraq had the same enemy: Sunni Islamic extremism. He assumed incorrectly. Saddam believed that the greatest threat to his regime came from Sunni extremists, not Iran, not the US."