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LISA MULLINS: Charles Duelfer knew Iraq as well as any American official before and after the invasion. He was Deputy Chairman of the UN weapons inspection team during the Clinton Administration, and in 2004, President Bush put Duelfer in charge of the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Charles Duelfer's new book is called “Hide and Seek.” It paints a picture of America's handling of Iraq, and it's not a pretty one.

CHARLES DUELFER: The Department of Defense didn't trust the CIA and didn't trust the State Department. It was like Shia and Sunni in Washington. And if you can't organize Washington around our common mission, how on earth are you going to do that in Baghdad?

MULLINS: Charles Duelfer says the seeds of Washington's chaotic post-invasion policies had been planted even prior before the invasion.

DUELFER: There was a decision that the White House made in 2002 explicitly blocking the CIA from doing any kind of preparatory work for post-Saddam governance. And that to me was an enormous mistake.

MULLINS: When did you find out about that?

DUELFER: I found out about it the year after I'd been doing a lot of this work in support of the CIA, but I found out in April of 2003, when I was in Baghdad. I had to explain to a lot of Iraqis who I knew very well – technocrats, bureaucrats, professors who had studied in the West and their lives had been destroyed. They could not understand how the last superpower could be this stupid.

MULLINS: Do you think it was stupidity at work?
DUELFER: No. I think, you know, there were individuals -- no one involved in this was doing something because they thought it was evil. They did it because they were pursuing their sense of what was good. But where I fought some of the decision-making was they didn't know how ignorant they were, and they spent more time trying to sort out things in Washington than trying to understand where the crux of the issue was, which was in the country of Iraq. And that to me was a damnable mistake.

MULLINS: You had opportunities to speak with members of Saddam's regime and try to create a pipeline through which the Bush administration could talk through back channels to members of the regime, people who you trusted. Describe those channels. Describe the people who you're talking about and what you did to try and make the link between Washington and Baghdad?

DUELFER: In fact, there were opportunities for dialogue in both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. During the Clinton administration, the regime in Baghdad came to me and others and said, “What would you need from us to even have a dialogue?” And they offered a lot.

MULLINS: Was this Saddam?

DUELFER: This was Saddam's number 2, basically. What they failed to appreciate was the dynamics in Washington where, no matter who was in power, the other party would have just roundly criticized anyone for opening a dialogue with Saddam. In retrospect, when you look at what the alternatives to this horrible war have been, well the notion of a dialogue with Saddam even if its goal is to maneuver him out of power – and many senior Iraqis asked me that question. They said, “Look. Would not it have been easier if you pretended to get close to us and then maneuver this guy out?” You know, there are also contributing factors. You know, we did not have an embassy operating in Baghdad for well over a decade. I did not fully appreciate the uniqueness of my knowledge. I knew all of Saddam's people. I was the only senior American who knew this. We paid a big price for not having that embassy, and I would draw people's attention to this when we consider cases like Iran and North Korea.

MULLINS: Make the tie for us there.

DUELFER: In the United States, people didn't have a tactile feel for the government and the regime. They did not understand how Saddam operated. There was only a cartoon like image of Saddam and this country. And it turns out, and we spent a lot of time with Saddam after the war, he was a complex guy, as were his people around him. We similarly have a cartoon image of the leaders of Iran and certainly only a cartoon image of the leader in North Korea.

MULLINS: Talk more about Iran and about North Korea and where the United States is right now and what its posture is -- where these official relations stand?

DUELFER: The United States has placed enormous focus on the nuclear weapons and nuclear energy development program in Iran, and it tends to pivot off of just that one issue.

MULLINS: Excuse me for a second. That is such a huge factor with so much involved in terms of regional stability and real threats. How could it not make that paramount?

DUELFER: It can be paramount, but bear in mind that Iran is a country which is evolving anyway. It's a country where a majority of the people are very young. And all these people, unlike Iraq, all of them are on the internet. Iran is going to tend to evolve in a direction that is probably in our interest.

MULLINS: All right. So you're saying that you really have to know who you're dealing with, know their characteristics. Iraq is different from Iran; Iran is very different from North Korea?

DUELFER: North Korea is a strange case in many ways, similar to Iraq. There's a unitary actor there that drives the whole thing. And if you can get inside that person's head, as we did after the war with Saddam, you can understand perhaps what's going on. The problem is how do you get inside that person's head? It's an insular country. They do not have access to the rest of the world. There's no internet. There isn't satellite TV sprouting off of the roofs of their apartments. That is going to be a tough case. What would be good to avoid is to elevate Kim Jong-Il the way that Saddam was elevated. Bear in mind, every time the President of the United States mentions the name of some other leader, they get elevated to the same level.

MULLINS: So put a fine point on right now, based on what you know about what happened in Iraq, the mistakes made by Saddam, by the United States in particular, what the take home lesson is or what the US could and should be doing right now both in North Korea and Iraq?

DUELFER: You know, I think we need to be flexible in terms of the standards we set. You know, we set a very high standard for what we expected in Iraq after the war. And if we had simply said something akin to you know, “We need a government which is more responsive to its people,” without prescribing necessarily what it would be, we – you know, we took out Saddam, which was the gravity which held Iraq together. The notions of democracy which we tried to implant early on had the effect of causing factors to occur. We don't want to make those kinds of mistakes in Iran or North Korea or indeed other countries.

MULLINS: Charles Duelfer's book is called “Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.” Very nice to have you here.

DUELFER: Thank you very much.

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