[swift tones] [earnest music] - Hello everyone and welcome to "Amanpour and Company".

Here's what's coming up.

- This has been a slow motion mass murder of children five months in the making.

- [Host] The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins with still no relief for desperate Gazans or release for desperate Israeli hostages.

My exclusive conversation with Queen Rania of Jordan.

Then, America's missteps on the road to war in Iraq have been thoroughly picked over, but what did Saddam Hussein fail to understand about the United States?

Journalist Steve Coll reveals what went on inside Saddam's palaces in his new book, "The Achilles Trap".

And... - I was too proud to talk to anybody, and tried to keep up this facade that everything was going great for me on the outside.

- [Host] Michel Martin speaks with basketball star and social media phenomenon, Rex Chapman, about his new memoir on the struggles he has with mental health.

[earnest music continues] [earnest music continues] - [Announcer] "Amanpour and Company" is made possible by the Anderson Family Endowment, Jim Attwood and Leslie Williams, Candace King Weir, the Family Foundation of Leila and Mickey Straus, Mark J. Blechner, the Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation, Seton J. Melvin, Charles Rosenblum, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg.

Additional support provided by these funders, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins amid mounting tension in Jerusalem, across the Middle East, and amongst the Muslim population worldwide.

The threat of an Israeli invasion into Rafah is sparking a rift now between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his closest ally, the U.S. President Joe Biden.

President Biden warns such an incursion would cross a red line.

Prime Minister Netanyahu responds that his red line means preventing another October 7th.

And he's again flatly rejected President Biden's call for a two-state solution.

Israeli officials say an offensive into Rafah is not imminent, but neither has it been ruled out.

More than a million internally displaced Palestinians are sheltering in Rafah.

Food scarcity is bad there, but even worse in the north, which is why the U.S. and Europe are trying to ramp up sea convoys of aid while also resorting to airdropping food and humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

On Sunday, the U.S. and Jordan conducted another joint drop into northern Gaza, dangerous and desperate measures with no secure distribution, and local crime families grabbing whatever they can.

Jordan's Queen Rania has been outspoken in defense of Gaza's civilians, and urging the United States and other Israeli allies to use all their leverage to end what she calls Israel's deliberate effort to deprive those in need.

And I spoke with her exclusively from the King Abdullah Airbase in Jordan just ahead of another airdrop.

Queen Rania, welcome back to our program.

- Thank you, Christiane.

- Can I first ask you?

It is Ramadan.

It's just started.

And I wonder what your reflections are for yourself, for your family, for Muslims around the world celebrating, or maybe that's not the right word, marking Ramadan this year in the middle of this war?

- Well, you know, Christiane, Ramadan for us is a month of worship, charity, and compassion for our fellow human being.

And I think this year we're welcoming these holidays with very heavy hearts.

Ramadan is typically defined with family gatherings, people coming together, sharing a meal and breaking their fast together.

But what is it like for the people of Gaza today who are now hungry and thirsty, in tents or makeshift shelters, who are mourning their dead and mourning the life that they had just a few months ago?

Christiane, since the beginning of this war, Israel has cut off everything that is required to sustain a human life: food, fuel, shelter, medicine, water.

And it has been going on now for five months and left the people of Gaza completely reliant on outside assistance.

And actually it has systematically denied and delayed a lot of that assistance, occasionally bombing some of the convoys that bring this assistance and shooting at some of the people who are trying to get whatever scarce resources that they can get.

According to the UN, every single person in Gaza today is hungry.

Over a quarter of the population, that's more than 550,000 people, are one step away from famine.

Experts say that they have never seen a population descend into such mass hunger so rapidly.

I mean, I'm hearing of people just eating whatever they can get their hands on including grass, or they're having to grind bird feed or animal fodder just to make bread.

And in the north of Gaza, people are not on the verge of starvation.

They're actually dying of starvation.

It starts with the most vulnerable, the elderly, the wounded, babies.

We're hearing increasing number of babies who are dying from severe malnutrition and thirst.

And if things don't change, I think these cases are gonna be spiraling throughout the strip.

And this has been a slow motion mass murder of children five months in the making.

Children who were thriving and healthy just months ago are wasting away in front of their parents.

Starvation is a very slow, cruel, and painful death.

Your muscles shrink.

Your immune system shuts down.

Your organs give out.

Imagine being a parent having to go through that, witness your child going through that and not being able to do anything to help.

It is absolutely shameful, outrageous, and entirely predictable what's happening in Gaza today because it was deliberate.

- Queen Rania, we have been reporting systematically what you are describing.

In fact, a lot of the world is now and has been reporting this severe hunger, the statistics, the pictures that you're talking about.

I wonder whether you think that is the reason why, for instance, the United States, the UK, other nations which are allies of Israel have started to really ramp up their need to deliver aid, like the airdrops that Jordan has been involved in?

You see the U.S. doing it.

You see the idea of a floating pier in order to bring much more aid via the sea.

Do you think the message that you've just described has actually now gotten through?

- Well, look, let me just be very clear about what these airdrops are.

They are us resorting to desperate measures in order to address a desperate situation.

These airdrops are literally just drops in an ocean of unmet needs.

And King Abdullah has said from the very beginning, they are neither sufficient nor are they a substitute for humanitarian access at scale.

So countries should not use them as a way out, nor should they be viewed as an excuse for not doing what needs to be done.

And that is implementing an immediate and sustained ceasefire, opening all access points into Gaza, particularly land routes, streamlining the inspection process and making sure that there is safe access within Gaza so that the aid can be distributed.

Every moment counts.

Children are starving as we speak so every moment and every meal counts.

And so I think now we're past the stage of trying to talk Israel into doing these things.

We need to actually start using measures and political leverage to get them to do those things.

- Can I ask you to describe what Jordan has done?

Well, first of all, you're sitting in an airbase.

I believe behind you is some of the goods and humanitarian items that will be dropped.

Tell me when they're going to be dropped into Gaza, and how has Jordan's experience been with, for instance, its hospital there, with the airdropping?

- Well, look, the reason why we started doing these airdrops is we found that after trying so hard in vain to persuade Israel to open the access point, the land access point, that we had to do something.

We couldn't just sit idle and watch people starving.

And so King Abdullah started as you know, organizing these airdrops.

But I have to emphasize that the need is much greater than what we're being able to provide.

As it stands today, there are trucks, there's tons of food in trucks that are miles away from people who are starving.

So the hunger is not a natural disaster.

This is a manmade, Israeli-made disaster.

It is deprivation by design.

No matter the volume of the aid going in, nothing is a substitute for a ceasefire.

Delivering aid under bombardment does not stop the destruction, the death, and the heartbreak.

We cannot save people from hunger only then to bomb them to death.

So again, an immediate ceasefire is the number one priority.

- So clearly Hamas has said that it wants a long-term ceasefire.

As you've heard, not only the Israeli government, but also the U.S. president said that when they thought there was a possibility of a ceasefire and a release of hostages and much increased aid into Gaza, the last thing we heard was that it's up to Hamas to sign on.

What does Jordan believe to be the sticking point with a ceasefire?

- Look, I'm not privy to the specifics of the negotiations.

What I do know is that from a humanitarian perspective, we need to secure a ceasefire as soon as possible so that aid operations can be restored at scale, so that people can start burying their dead so then they can start healing.

This has been going on for way too long, and this is not a time to hold out for political victories.

There are no victories to be had as long as this war continues.

There's only loss after loss after loss.

And I believe that the international community really needs to weigh in.

Israel has been able to operate with impunity, and that has really affected the credibility of many countries in the West.

Now I'm happy to see that some nations have changed their positions, have shifted.

You know, a country like France.

We're very grateful to President Macron who has called for a ceasefire and who has been with us executing these airdrops right from the beginning.

Countries like Spain, Belgium, Ireland, South Africa, Latin America, all these countries are asking for a ceasefire.

We've seen solidarity from the global public, exceptional solidarity from the global public, and that's sometimes created a rift between the public and their own leaders, including in places where you are.

Where the public is wondering when are their governments going to start taking more decisive positions?

You know, it's just that every time a child is being pulled out of the rubble, the credibility of countries, even like the United States, their values of equality, justice and human rights, they're called into question.

People in my part of the world are not only angry, they are disillusioned and disappointed.

Many people admired Western values, and now they're having to rethink their worldview because they're asking, "How come human rights are granted to some and denied to others?"

- So President Biden publicly urged no offensive into Rafah, saying that I cannot sit back and see another 30,000 deaths in Gaza, and said to Israel that it would cause more damage to the Israeli cause than benefit Israel.

Then Netanyahu responds saying, "My red line is no more Hamas, no more threats, and by the way, no state, no two-state solutions."

So what is Jordan thinking about not just the immediate, but the day after?

Because clearly you are the country, one of them, that does believe in a two state and does have a peace treaty with Israel.

- Look, Christiane, I think it's no coincidence that we're witnessing one of the most violent episodes of this conflict, under one of the most hard-line, racist governments in Israel's history.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, by his own admission, says that his policy was based on divide and conquer, covertly propping Hamas in order to undermine the Palestinian Authority and then say there's no partner for peace.

Last year, even before October 7th, we had set a record in terms of settlement expansion and construction.

Just last week, the Israeli government approved plans to build 3,500 more illegal settlements on occupied West Bank land.

And sure, some of its allies condemn those plans, but as in previous cases, there's condemnation but then the plans are carried out.

As long as Israel is allowed to get away with breaking international law, as long as its allies don't hold it accountable, it will just increase its sense of impunity.

So for years, Israel talks peace, but then condemns it to death by settlements, making a contiguous, independent Palestinian state less viable by the day.

And for the longest time, we hear the international community talking about a two-state solution while allowing Israel to create a one-state reality.

And so I think the time for trying to persuade Israel to do the right thing, it has long passed.

It is time for us...

When you look at the horrendous reality that's in Gaza today, it is hard to believe that Israel is being unfairly singled out, that it's being held to a higher standard.

Critics of Israel merely wanted to do the bare minimum, which is just abide by international law.

- Obviously, you were received at the White House along with the king.

You also went to Capitol Hill where some of the strongest support does reside.

What message did you deliver on Capitol Hill, and what did you hear from them?

- Well, I think a lot of people need to know more about this conflict to really understand the intricacies of it.

To understand that this is one of the greatest historical injustices, and to understand what the root cause of this issue is.

To understand that this conflict did not begin on October 7th, that it was a result of years of occupation, of settlement expansion, of human rights abuses, of disregard for international law.

And this is what led us to this point.

If we look at Israel today, sometimes you hear the prime minister justifying the war by saying that he is doing what the public wants, and that the overwhelming majority of Israelis support this war.

Well, I refuse to believe that an entire population can look at what's going on in Gaza and be okay with it.

In Israel, the dehumanization of Palestinians is systematic.

It's ingrained, it is ubiquitous.

They believe that if we don't kill them, they're going to kill us.

And so I blame hard-line Israeli leaders for keeping their people in this perpetual state of fear of an existential threat that doesn't exist, and making them feel like just killing Palestinians and killing Hamas is gonna be the solution to the problem.

- [Host] Let me ask you- - The real solution to the problem is to end the occupation.

Palestinians do not hate Israelis because of who they are, they hate them because of what they're doing to them.

And so if we do the greatest guarantee for Israel's security, and this is what I said to the Americans, if you wanna safeguard Israel's security, there is no better way to do it than through a just and comprehensive peace.

No army in the world, the strongest army in the world, the most proficient intelligence, whatever, will not guarantee Israel's security as much as a just and comprehensive peace would.

We, in this part of the world, need to find a way to share these holy lands in peace.

- So what you say, I mean, basically the Israeli public does support the war because they want, A, their people back, and B, they don't want to live side by side with Hamas at all ever again.

They don't want to be in that situation under that threat.

You said it doesn't present an existential threat.

- [Guest] Right, but I mean, let's just talk about- - Yeah, but hold on a second.

Hold on a second.

I mean, the question is, the question is how?

If it was you, and you were to give a speech or a visit to the Israeli people, who said to you, "But Queen Rania, you may have a peace treaty with us, but look what Hamas did to us on October 7th."

What would you say to them about how they should...?

I mean, you've talked about the history, but I mean, there's such a trauma that everybody we talk to right now says, "It's still as if it is October 7th."

Even though Prime Minister Netanyahu's ratings are in the dumpster, they don't support him, but they do support the idea of not having that threat anywhere near them anymore.

- I would say that as devastating and as traumatic as October 7th was, it doesn't give Israel license to commit atrocity after atrocity.

And Israel experienced one October 7th.

Since then, the Palestinians have experienced 156 October 7.

They have been going through this every day.

And prior to October 7th, they have been living in 50 years of oppression, of occupation, of having their movement restricted, having every aspect of their lives dominated, being humiliated.

If I speak to the Israeli public, I would say, if you want your peace and your security, you have to address this big injustice that's on your doorstep.

There is no shortcut, there is no security measure that is going to bring the more hopeful future and the stability that you want in your lives, other than finding a way to live with Palestinians.

Israeli leaders must stop treating the existence of Palestinians as an inconvenient truth, as a demographic challenge, as a mow that needs to be mowed every now and then.

Palestinians are here to stay, and so we have to find a way to live with one another.

And we have to be able to rehumanize, to be able to see the humanity of the other, our humanity reflected in others' eyes.

An Israeli mother should understand that a Palestinian mother cares about her children just as much as she does, and there's just no way around that.

I don't believe that peace is just about politics.

Peace is about a state of mind, it's a culture, it's about values.

And those are the values that really need to be addressed, and they're long overdue.

- Queen Rania, thank you very much for joining us.

- Thank you, Christiane.

- Now, both the Gaza and Ukraine wars were addressed at the Oscars last night.

Director Jonathan Glazer had some strong words as he accepted the Award for Best International Feature.

His chilling film, 'Zone of Interest', follows the domestic life of the Nazi commandant and his family at Auschwitz.

- Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.

Whether the victims of October the- [audience cheering and applauding] Whether the victims of October the seventh in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all are victims of this dehumanization.

How do we resist?

[audience applauding] - Glazer's film is all about the banality of evil and a warning against complicity.

Indeed, he told us in an interview last month, "The film is not saying, 'Look at what they did.'

It's also saying, 'Look at what we do.'"

And the war in Ukraine was also in the spotlight.

The film "20 Days in Mariupol" won the Oscar for Best Documentary.

It was shot in that Ukrainian port city during the early assault and siege by Russian forces.

Here's photographer and director Mstyslav Chernov.

- This is the first, this is the first Oscar in the Ukrainian history.

[audience applauding] We can make sure that the history record is set straight and that the truth will prevail.

And that the people of Mariupol and those who've given their lives will never be forgotten, because cinema forms memories and memories form history.

- And harrowing images like these from Mariupol will indeed be impossible to forget.

[crowd speaking in foreign language] - And two years on, Ukrainians continue to suffer such horrors every day.

I spoke to Chernov back in December here in the studio.

- If we don't report everything as it is, if we don't show to people across the world, to our viewers, to our audience, the reality of war, it becomes acceptable.

It's a big danger not exposing the war for all its brutality, for all its absurd.

And if it's polished, if it's sanitized, then it's acceptable.

And that shouldn't be the case.

- So the reality is that MAGA politics in Congress continues to prevent desperately needed ammunition and weapons reaching Ukraine.

And latest news from the battlefield shows that Russia currently is firing around 10,000 shells a day compared to just 2,000 a day from the Ukrainian side.

They are running out.

The best actor winner, Cillian Murphy, who played Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, dedicated his award to the peacemakers everywhere.

It is generally taken as an article of faith that the 2003 Iraq War was the single biggest American foreign policy blunder in recent history, with blowback still being felt far and wide.

Investigations and special commissions established within weeks, practically, that Saddam Hussein actually did not possess the weapons of mass destruction, which were the reason for George W. Bush's war.

The two-decade mystery about Saddam Hussein's refusal to admit that is being revealed in a breakthrough new book called "The Achilles Trap".

Journalist Steve Coll uncovers the story from inside Saddam's palaces, and he's joining me now to explain the dangerous assumptions on both sides that paved the way for that war.

Steve Coll, welcome to the program.

- Thanks.

- So honestly, it's war everywhere.

It's in our consciences and our consciousness, and it's just everywhere as we've just talked about in this entire show.

I wonder whether listening to everything that's happening now you feel that actually this book, "The Achilles Trap", and the miscommunication, or maybe the deliberate misunderstandings, led to a war that could have been prevented?

- I think in the case of Iraq, yes, no doubt.

And the misunderstanding was mutual.

That's what I was reflecting on listening to some of the other conversations in this program, is that we live in a world of conflict and that means a world of adversaries.

As some of your guests have said about different conflicts, the tendency of politicians sometimes incented by their own domestic politics is to dehumanize the enemy and to caricature them.

And what the story of Saddam Hussein's thinking about his WMD shows is that we did not understand who he was or why he was motivated to behave the way he did.

- And he didn't understand what the U.S. knew and didn't know, and he had his own ideas basically out of whole cloth about what America might be thinking.

So first I wanna ask you, okay, this is a long time coming, this book.

As I said, we understood very shortly after the invasion that there were no WMD, but it's taken this long for us to understand Saddam's inner thinking.

And that's because you got access to all sorts of records.

How did it take that long to make them public, or at least to you?

- Well, I mean, so it turns out that Saddam tape-recorded his leadership conversations as assiduously as Richard Nixon, thousands of hours, and he also kept records of his presidential office and his intelligence services.

So there's a vast trove of documentation and recordings about what he was saying and thinking.

He was a micromanager.

He wrote in the margins of a lot of memos that he sent around.

But as you say, these records are not available.

They haven't generally been available.

I ended up collaborating with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit in the U.S., and we sued the Pentagon, which holds them.

- Is that like a FOIA, freedom of information?

- Precisely, yeah.

In order to file the lawsuit, you initially file a request under FOIA.

Then they don't comply.

Then you sue them, and then they settle.

And that's what happened.

So I got a batch of these materials that way.

And it's a complicated history, but essentially those records do take you inside Saddam's mind at critical points of his conflict with the United States.

- I don't know whether we should work backward or forward.

I mean, he was wrong in the Iran-Iraq War about America, in the First Gulf War about America, in the George W. Bush war about America.

So what stood out the most, let's just say about his miscalculation that led to the invasion and his toppling?

- Well, he's so contradictory because he can be quite shrewd about the way the world is organized and about power.

After all, he retained power under threat for 20 years, so he must know something about how to manage the threats against him.

At the same time, he saw the world through a series of interlocking conspiracy theories, that left him very confused about U.S. decision-making or the reality of U.S. capabilities.

So for example, one reason why he didn't cooperate on WMD inspections in the run-up to the war was that he believed the CIA already knew that he didn't possess any WMD, because of course they're omniscient, they know everything.

But then follow the logic.

Since they know I don't have it, the accusation that I do is just a game to set the stage for a war that has no relation to WMD.

So why should I play their game?

Why should I cooperate?

It's all theater.

Now that is a microcosm of a whole series of other similar beliefs that he held going back to the 1980s.

And by the way, it wasn't as if he was all crazy or without evidence for some of his beliefs, because we did things that were genuinely confusing for him.

- [Host] Like?

- Well, I mean, Iran-Contra.

You mentioned the eighties, right?

So he starts a war with Iran in 1980 unprovoked.

And then in 1982, the Reagan administration panics, thinks he's about to lose the war.

The Iranians are gonna break through his lines.

So they send the CIA officer to Baghdad carrying secret intelligence information to help the Iraqis see what's coming, and to prevent it.

They then cooperate for years, the U.S. providing satellite pictures to Saddam.

All along Saddam is saying to his comrades, we can see on the tapes now, "I don't trust this.

These photos may be doctored or if they're not doctored, they're giving the same ones to Iran."

His team say, "Boss, you're being too suspicious."

And then in 1986, as you remember, it was announced in the United States that we were in fact cooperating with the Israelis to provide Ayatollah Khomeini with weapons and intelligence.

- It was literally all over the place.

- It was literally all over the place.

And so there's this great tape of him after Reagan makes the speech announcing that he has in fact been secretly supporting Iran, where Saddam comes in and says, "I told you so.

This is the reality.

There is a permanent conspiracy involving the CIA, the Israelis, Ayatollah Khomeini."

By the way, Khomeini is an American project.

And even in the nineties, he would refer back to Iran-Contra in explaining why he was taking a rebellious course.

- And in the nineties, let's say the early nineties, when, I remember because I covered it, there were weeks of mounting tension, and he just kept threatening and threatening.

And the U.S., what did the U.S. do?

Because in your documents, you say something incredible.

I want you to say what you discovered Saddam Hussein said.

Had he been warned?

- You mean about going into Kuwait?

- [Host] Yes, in 1990.

- So he later said, "If you didn't want me to go into Kuwait, why didn't you tell me?"

And this became of course, a huge episode in American politics at the time because there was an ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, a pioneering woman who was the first Arabist of her generation to serve at that level, and she was thrown under the bus by the Bush administration saying that she had- - [Host] H.W.

Bush.

- H.W.

Bush.

That she had gone in and been too soft with Saddam in an important meeting.

Well, I've now had the benefit of these records and hindsight, and clearly she has been falsely accused of being responsible for this.

Two points, first, to the extent that what she said was too soft.

It was written for her by the H.W.

White House.

I mean, she was just reading out- - So there was no "Saddam Hussein, do not cross that red line, because we will oust you"?

- Because we were still trapped in the policy of cooperation with him.

And George H.W.

Bush, being a good foreign policy president, was calling all around the Arab world asking for advice.

He saw the threats that Saddam was making.

And he would call up King Fahd in Saudi Arabia, King Hussein in Jordan, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and say, "What should I think?

I'm worried."

And they would all say, "We got it, George.

This is just a bluff.

Don't get involved.

It's all just putting the arm on the Kuwaitis to get some loans forgiven.

Please stay away."

And Bush being a kind of internationalist, believing in the advice of allies, said, "Okay, I'll take their advice."

And it turned out it was wrong.

- But isn't this something you also raised, the idea of miscommunication between leaders?

Why didn't Bush pick up the phone and call Saddam Hussein?

And then you have a very interesting... We'll get to the Clinton one in a sec.

Why didn't Bush call, leader to leader?

- Well, he should have, and he might have.

In fact, at the very end when Iraqi forces went across the Kuwait border into the Emirate, his aides rushed to him in the White House and said, "Time to call Saddam."

And just as they were about to do that, they got word from the CIA that Iraqi troops were already downtown, Kuwait City.

So Bush says, "Oh, I guess it's too late for that."

- So now we go back to the fall of 2002.

Here is George W. Bush on Saddam Hussein.

- He deceives, he delays, he denies.

And the United States, and I'm convinced the world community aren't gonna fall for that kind of rhetoric by him again.

- So we've discussed a little bit of it, but I think it's so interesting.

You write, "A CIA capable of making an analytical mistake on the scale of its myths about Iraq's WMD was not part of his worldview."

- Yes, and so we mentioned, we talked before about how his confusion about the CIA's omniscience and omnipotence confused and misled him, but let's remember the confusing underlying story.

So in 1991, after Iraqi troops were expelled from Kuwait, we now know that Saddam ordered his son-in-law to destroy all the WMD stocks he had, but he didn't tell anyone about what he had done.

He didn't keep any records- - So that's nuclear, biological, and... - Chemical.

- All three.

- All three, and also missiles that were banned because of their long-range capabilities.

And so he lied to his own generals, he lied to inspectors about it, and he kept no records of what he had done.

- [Host] Because?

- Because he had it in his mind that he wanted to pass inspections, and then be relieved of sanctions.

And if he passed inspections, maybe the Russians or the French would come in and support him and get sanctions relief.

He could only pass inspections if he didn't have anything there to get caught with, but at the same time to admit that he was disarming before the world would've been humiliating, he would have none of that.

He sought glory and dignity in the Arab world as a Fidel Castro defiant sort of leader.

And he also feared that it would make him vulnerable, that if Iran or Israel saw that he had no deterrence, that they would attack him.

- It's remarkable and again, back to communications.

I think it's so revealing.

One of the quotes, it's about Clinton, because I remember a lot of cruise missiles into Iraq during the nineties.

This is from Bill Clinton privately to Tony Blair who was prime minister here in 1998.

"If I weren't constrained by the press," says Clinton, "I would pick up the call and call the SOB."

- Yeah.

- And he didn't.

- No, he didn't, and in fact- - So what do you mean by the press?

What did he mean by constrained by the press?

- Well, he meant that he would be attacked by House Republicans who then controlled, under then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, the House of Representatives, and he felt under a lot of political pressure over Iraq.

The Republicans were giving him a hard time saying he was being too soft on Saddam.

But what the larger issue is that we now can recognize that between 1991 and 2003, there was no contact at high levels between the Iraqi government and the United States.

- 1991 and 2003.

- 2003.

Nevermind Clinton picking up the phone and calling Saddam, not even at the intelligence service level, not even in secret, not even diplomats talking to one another.

They were completely isolated by design in order to try to maintain allies or a coalition of people who would sign up to the sanctions.

So they were afraid that if they started talking to Saddam, that they would weaken the consensus around the sanctions which, after all we now know, punish the Iraqi people more than they punish Saddam.

- Awful.

I mean, it was.

And we saw after the toppling of Saddam, how the sanctions had essentially ravaged and crippled the country, which was one part of how they weren't able to rise apart from anything else.

But I think this is just incredibly crazy as well.

You wrote that if the United States had a better read on Saddam right before 2003, they might have realized that he had lost interest in the military adventures, and he had turned to writing novels.

- Yeah, I'm afraid so.

Yes.

They're not very good.

But he had entered his sixties.

And in part because we had no contact with him, so we had no basis to kind of get that tactile human feel for who he had become, we didn't know that in his sixties he wasn't the same as he was when he was a younger adventurer.

And he had become isolated within his own kind of palace and intelligence system.

But he was using his time obsessively to write novels in handwritten Arabic hours a day, turning pages over to his editors.

And he wrote four in a period of two or three, four years.

And anyway, he had his mind on other subjects.

- I want to ask you, finally when he did talk to Americans, they were the interrogators.

- [Guest] Yes.

- And he was busy smoking cigarettes and cigars again.

- Cigars, yes.

- [Host] What kind of relationship did they have?

We've got 30 seconds.

- Yeah, there are about two records, one from an FBI interrogator and then also a CIA interrogator.

And generally, if they asked him about history, he was forthcoming and would be willing to explain why the Americans were wrong.

- Yeah, I wish we could go on.

It is just a fascinating insight.

Anyway, "The Achilles Trap".

I didn't even ask you why.

We'll put it on online, why it's called "The Achilles Trap".

Steve Coll, thank you so much indeed.

Now our next guest is a basketball veteran who spent 12 years in the NBA.

Rex Chapman was a top 10 pick in 1988, but he gambled away his millions, and he became addicted to opioids after several injuries.

He reflects on the highs and the lows of his career in a new memoir, and now he shares his story with Michel Martin.

- Thanks, Christiane.

Rex Chapman, thank you so much for talking with us.

- Thank you for having me, Michel.

Thank you.

- I mean, you know, best high school player in Kentucky, superstar at the University of Kentucky.

First-ever draft pick of the expansion Charlotte Hornets, a member of the U.S. National Team.

And so let's go back to the beginning.

Why basketball?

- I played every sport growing up.

I did love football.

I didn't like getting hit, but I liked hitting.

Baseball, I couldn't hit, but I could feel and I could pitch and all that.

Whatever season it was, I was a really good swimmer.

That was my main sport growing up first.

But basketball was... My dad played basketball.

He knows everyone in basketball.

He coached basketball.

And from the time literally that I could walk and pick up a basketball, I was dribbling a basketball on the side at his practices.

So I learned probably how to dribble behind my back and between my legs and all that stuff before I knew it was hard.

It was just second nature to me.

By the time I got in first grade, I could do things the fifth and sixth graders were doing.

And that was just kind of my chart, that's the way my life went.

- 12 seasons in the NBA, but somehow the title of your memoir, "It's Hard for Me to Live with Me".

It's hard to fathom why.

- I know, I struggled a lot in my life just with insecurities and different things.

I for sure, dating back to when I was a teenager, was starting to suffer from depression a little bit and some mental illness.

I was constantly getting in trouble, just really running wild.

I didn't really have any coping skills for what I was dealing with externally.

The basketball part, I'm not gonna say it was easy.

I had worked so hard at it for so long that it was kind of like second nature.

And it was just all of the other stuff that I couldn't handle or had trouble handling, the off-court, interviews, relationships, living in an adult world when I felt 12.

So yeah, it's hard for me to live with me sometimes.

- Still now, still to this day?

- Still some, but way better.

The last eight or nine years, nine and a half actually, I've been clean from opioids.

And really from that point on, started making a conscious effort to try to figure out myself and kinda why I made the choices I did.

And that's been painful, but it's been good.

I just didn't have any coping skills.

And I've had to learn how to sit in my bad emotions and not numb them, not run and get a pain pill and try to escape.

So that's been the hardest part.

- People are gonna know you from lots of different parts of your life.

Some people are gonna know you as kind of the basketball star.

Some people are gonna know the fact that you did struggle with opioid addiction for years, and were arrested for it.

And other people are gonna know you as kind of the social media guy that has like a million followers, and you kind of lay it on the line.

You really go into detail on all of those lives, and it's painful.

It's painful to read in parts, so that has to have been painful to write.

What made you wanna do it?

- It's been terrifying.

I've kept a lot of this stuff bottled up for years.

I mean, there were times I had to just bail for a couple of weeks 'cause emotionally I couldn't do it, or I had remembered something that happened that I had completely compartmentalized and had to kind of take a step back.

In 1986, at school, unrelated to basketball, I had a panic attack.

It was something that was going on.

They were kind of telling me who I could date and who I couldn't date at school, and I kind of realized that was B.S.

And I had what at the time, I'd only heard people describe as like a nervous breakdown.

Like I woke up as a teenager and I couldn't move, and everything seemed awful.

I thought everything is, what's the point of any of this?

And I forgot about that for about 30 years.

And about six months ago when we were finishing up the book, I had another panic attack.

I've never had one.

I'd never had one since, I had one again.

And I'm sure therapy possibly could have been a lifesaver for me when I was 18 or 19 years old.

I was too proud to talk to anybody, and tried to keep up this facade that everything was going great for me on the outside.

- One of the really interesting things about your book is the way you deal with race, grapple with race, as a White player.

The racial dynamics of the sport and of, kind of, the whole ecosystem of the sport.

So if I could just get you to read a little bit from the book.

- [Guest] Sure.

- You know, page 51.

- "I hear myself being compared often to former Wildcats.

Kyle Macy is the one I hear the most.

I also hear a lot of comparisons to non-Kentucky players like Pete Maravich and Jerry West.

No doubt those guys were great players, but I don't know anything about them except that they are White.

That bugs me because I think of myself more like Darrell Griffith and N.C. State's David Thompson, the two guys I idolize the most.

Both of them are killer athletes who attack the rim with abandon.

I try to imitate them every time out.

But that's how it is in sports, White guys are compared to White guys and Black guys are compared to Black guys.

It's a pattern that will recur throughout my career, and bother me to no end."

- And that's just the half of it.

You were it's fair to say, in love with an African-American girl.

Right?

- Yeah.

- And you were discouraged from dating her.

Say more about that.

Shawn Higgs and I, Shawn, she was my girlfriend in high school, like probably my first love.

We were 15, 16 years old, and we grew up together.

People in our hometown didn't like it very much.

So we kind of hid it and as best we could, all the kids knew.

She went to Kentucky, too, and she was a track star in high school.

We were in a town of about 60,000 where we grew up.

And I think we just assumed that when we went to school that it's a bigger city.

I think we thought of Lexington, Kentucky, as like New York.

We got to Lexington and started going to class together and stuff like that.

And very quickly, I got called into the coach's office, and they said, "Hey, Rex, listen."

Because also every school that recruited me knew Shawn was my girlfriend, and they had made it clear to me that that was not gonna be an issue.

All of them did.

And when I came in, the coaches were in there, and our head coach, he said, "Hey, Rex, listen, you and Shawn been walking to class together.

You need to be careful about that, maybe just you guys spend time together when it's dark or at night.

I said, "Yes, sir."

And it was the most cowardice thing ever.

And I just didn't, I couldn't stand up for myself.

And also I knew I was gonna have to go tell Shawn.

And so I just remember telling Shawn and her eyes starting to well up.

And me in that moment thinking, "I'm never gonna love something so much that I hurt like this."

And I felt something kind of break in me a little bit at the time to where I started putting my emotions away.

- I know it's still personally painful, but what do you think that says about sort of the world you were in writ large?

Is that White players like yourself have to be sort of reserved for White people to like, or what do you think that that means?

- Well, first of all, I didn't do the work in college to be an Academic All-SEC person or make the Dean's List, but I did, miraculously.

They just put me on those things.

They needed my image to be the all-American kid on campus, White kid homegrown from Kentucky.

I guess my dating my girlfriend didn't fit that sort of image, and they were definitely afraid of it, they just were.

And it still makes me mad.

It still makes me sad.

- Hmm.

I see that.

So let's fast-forward, the other big pain point in your life.

You're in the pros, you are having a successful career.

How did the addiction start?

- Yeah.

Well, I think, again, I was always a basketball addict.

I just didn't, I didn't drink and drug, but I would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, at midnight, realizing someone on the West Coast was still at a park playing.

And I'd do pushups or go run, and come back, go to bed.

I was weirdly motivated like that, so I was an addict always.

If somebody gave me a Jolly Rancher, the little candy, I'd be like, "One?

I want that whole bag.

Those are good."

I've always been that way.

If I like it, I like it.

And I started gambling when I got stressed.

I left and I was stressed all the time.

And so I would go to the track, spend hours at the track, and then go back to the gym.

So that's probably where it started.

And then my last three years of playing in the NBA, I had seven surgeries.

Right at the end of my last surgery, a doctor gave me a new drug called OxyContin.

He said, "Take it."

I took it and in two days I was in love.

It was the greatest thing I've ever had in my life, and probably have had.

It made me feel smarter, funnier, better, better husband, better dad, more relaxed in my own skin.

If people came up and wanted to chitchat, I was all for it.

Like, come on, all my social anxiety went away.

And as they say in rehab, "Drugs are fun at first.

And then it's drugs and problems.

And then it's just problems after a short period of time."

And that's what it was with me.

18 months after retiring, I was taking probably 40 Vicodin and nine OxyContin a day.

And Danny Ainge came to me and said, "Hey, you are messing your life up.

You gotta go to rehab."

So that was kind of the start, and that was in 2001 of me going to rehab.

And I did it three different times, the last time in 2014 after I was arrested for shoplifting in an Apple Store.

I still can't.

It's hard to say those words.

And yeah, after that I went to rehab, and I was broken and broke, and I was rock bottom.

And if I was gonna live, then I was gonna have to try to figure out what landed me in this spot.

- You tell this really heartbreaking story of when you were released from jail, after having been arrested for shoplifting at an Apple Store.

And you don't have your car.

You don't have anything.

You don't have your license, you have nothing.

- I'll read it for you.

- You really don't mind?

- Okay.

"After a long, sleepless night, I'm taken at 6:00 a.m. to appear in front of a judge.

They let me go.

As soon as they hand me my wallet, I dig out that sheet of medicine and put it under my tongue.

I have no way to get home.

So I start walking toward the freeway, my mind in a total fog.

It's hot.

And after 20 minutes, my son Zeke finds me and pulls up in his car.

He gets out, comes around to hug me, and starts bawling.

He keeps asking me over and over if I'm okay.

I know I'm sad, but I don't really feel it.

I barely console him.

That's what life is like when you're addicted to drugs, you just go numb.

Here I am, worst moment of my life, worst moment of his too.

Zeke is completely broken up, and yet I don't even shed a tear.

I climb back into his car.

After about five minutes, the medicine kicks in.

I feel much better, and Zeke drives me home.

Out one prison, back into another."

- Hmm.

That's tough.

But you're here to tell us about it, so that's a victory, right?

- I hope so.

I hope so.

- It's interesting, the same community that so let you down, not the same exact ones, but basketball world, right?

- [Guest] Yeah.

- That so disappointed you and were such hypocrites about the whole thing.

When you kind of hit that moment, a lot of them really put their arms around you.

- The NBA has always done that.

And I've never really spoken on this, but when I came in, I left school, and I didn't wanna leave school.

I didn't feel like I was ready to leave school yet, especially emotionally and socially.

Basketball-wise, I was fine, and I went right into the NBA and was fine physically, but emotionally I wasn't.

And when I got into the NBA, guys like Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas, and all the stars, Black stars, they all put their arms around me, all of them.

And I was, I still am, I feel like a lot of guys' little brother.

Joe Dumars and Rolando Blackman and all these guys, they knew, they knew what I'd been through.

None of us ever talked about it, but they were so damn nice to me.

And if not for them, my teammates, Dell Curry, Muggsy Bogues.

Dell taught me how to tie a tie.

But everyone really put their arm around me and really helped raise me, 'cause I was the youngest player in the NBA by two or three years.

And so that part of it is so heartwarming, and it almost brings me to tears thinking about it when I have to articulate it 'cause they didn't have to do that.

I was a competitor of theirs.

But they did, and I'll never forget it.

- What reaction are you getting?

I know a lot of the younger athletes really enjoy it and follow you, but what about basketball world writ large?

- So far, no, it's been very positive, which kind of makes me feel bad too.

When you're 10 years old and you think about being a famous athlete some day and maybe writing your memoir, this isn't the memoir that you wanna write.

I wanted to write the one that Steve Nash will write someday or Grant Hill will write someday.

Just the all-American guy that did everything and could handle all that stuff.

I couldn't handle it, and that makes me feel bad.

And being praised for it is weird too.

I feel like I'm failing up, but a friend of mine told me the other day, he said, "Shut up.

What you're doing is not failing."

So I had to take that in.

- Well, before we let you go, one of the big stories in basketball world right now is of course LeBron James.

You were King Rex for a minute, but he's King James.

Just scored 40,000 points, but the other big story, Caitlin Clark.

What do you think about her?

- Oh, love her.

Also, LeBron took a picture with my book the other day and put it out just outta nowhere.

I mean, why?

I don't even know LeBron like that.

I just love and respect him, but great.

Caitlin Clark, amazing.

I think about this all the time, and I'm good friends with Candace Parker and different women's basketball players.

My sister is two years younger than I am, 54.

She was a great athlete.

But there were really... Women's sports at the time, a lot of women had to play on the boys' team, played Boys Little League and all that stuff.

What these women are doing, and my sister didn't have WNBA players to look up to.

There was no such thing.

Now, the girls and the women, the young girls have these idols like Candace Parker and Caitlin Clark to look up to.

And forget the sport part of it, the best times I've ever had in my life are on the back of a bus with my teammates, flying across the country with my teammates.

We deprived young women of that for a long time.

And now I just look in and I see all the heroes that these young ladies have to look up to.

I have three daughters.

My daughters are growing up in a different world than my sister grew up in, and I couldn't be happier about that.

- Hmm.

Well, Rex Chapman, it's been great talking with you.

- Thank you for being so comforting, 'cause this is a tough subject and subject matters tough to discuss, and I just really appreciate your care and kindness.

- Well, thank you.

Rex Chapman, thank you so much.

- Thanks, Michel.

- And that's it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's coming up on the show every night, sign up for our newsletter at PBS.org/Amanpour.

Thanks for watching and goodbye from London.

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