|
This is nothing new for Post, a former CIA profiler of 21 years, who studied some of the world's most notorious leaders including Hussein, and more recently North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
"I've devoted my entire career to creating political personality profiles of political leaders," said Post, founder and director of GW's Political Psychology graduate program. "Since the end of the Cold War, we have had an unstable international climate with leaders with access to nuclear weapons. It has been pertinent to create personal profiles of leaders like (Hussein and) Chavez and Kim."
Post developed the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior. He first gained national attention with his profiles of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, which were used by President Jimmy Carter during the Camp David Accords.
"That was my major accomplishment. Carter referred to these profiles as the most helpful documents during the Camp David Accords," he said.
Since the Camp David profiles, his opinions and analyses of foreign leaders have been featured in the media and used by Congress, the U.S. military and the United Nations, said Post's colleague Barry Schneider. The two co-edited, "Know thy Enemy: Profiles of Adversary Leaders and their Strategic Cultures."
"When something happens regarding a foreign country or leader, he is called upon for his opinion," said Schneider, who is director of the Air Force Counterproliferation Center at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. "You see him everywhere on television and print."
Jeffrey Akman, director of GW's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, said Post's work has "brought prestige" to the University.
From the time of his December 2003 apprehension by the U.S. troops to his December 2006 hanging by the Iraqi government, a defiant Hussein insisted he was still the leader of Iraq and opposed much of the Iraqi judicial process.
Post said he was not surprised.
According to the professor, Hussein was not psychotic, but suffered from malignant narcissism. His narcissism was evidenced in "extreme dreams of glory, paranoid orientation, absence of conscience and willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve a goal," said Post, who began profiling Saddam immediately after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
