remember Saddam was a very bright guy and a prolific liar. Like Clinton, it just came to him naturally.
He may well have been honest to set the record straight, or he may have been doing was he did best.
Events took a nasty little turn for Saddam, and he found himself getting some real old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon “justice”, which involved execution of the defeated king. But so long as he was alive, he could keep telling the story in the manner most beneficial to himself.
Veracity was not a factor in anything the deposed dictator of Iraq might have said. He was interested only in his “legacy” and how it would read a thousand years from now, as he wanted to be the equal, in history, of Saladin, famous for having kicked the Crusaders out of Syria and the Levantine in the 12th Century.
As it turned out, Saddam did not manage to kick out the modern “crusade”, which rather than establishing the supremacy of the Christian church, chose to overthrow the despotism that had been honed to an extreme level after the sweep of the Mongols throughmost of Western Asia and into Europe, and the later establishment of the Ottoman Empire, which proved to be one of the most tyrannical regimes ever established in the history of the world.