Saddam Husseinences, and so researchers have usually scored transcripts to assess
motive profiles (see Hermann 198ob; Winter 1980). Over the years,
I have assembled an interview-based sample of twenty-two world
leaders, drawn from a wide range of regions and political roles, as a
generic comparison sample for assessing other leaders. There is a
good deal of variation, in interlocutor, conditions, and intended
audience, across leaders and across the comparison interviews, which
introduces "noise" and error, thus making interview-based assess-
ments of world leaders less precise than the speech-based assessments
of Bill Clinton. However, this procedure does provide a basis for esti-
mating the motive profile of any other individual world leader from
the material available.
Even so, at the time I assessed Saddam Hussein's motives (shortly
after the end of the Gulf War in the spring of 1991), he was some-
what of a "fugitive" subject for interviewers. The readily available
material from books, magazines, and the Foreign Broadcast Information
Service Daily Report consisted of only eleven English-language texts of
interviews (only one was a true news conference), ranging over the
period April 1974-January 1991 (see appendix). Many of these texts
existed only as excerpts, and some showed signs of heavy editing. Six
of these interview texts could be characterized as seemingly more
spontaneous (or less edited), and five as less spontaneous or more
edited.^2
Table 16.2 presents the motive profiles of Saddam Hussein based
on all eleven interviews, on the more spontaneous interviews, and on
the less spontaneous interviews. All three profiles are quite similar:
quite high power motivation, above average affiliation motivation,
and very low achievement motivation. Saddam Hussein's power
motive score is considerably higher than his achievement score.
In comparing Saddam Hussein's motive profile with that of Bill
Clinton, it is important to focus only on the standardized scores,
since the raw scores are undoubtedly affected by factors such as the
format (speech versus interview) and occasion, which may obscure
individual differences. Thus, for example, almost any leader would
be likely to use more achievement imagery and less power imagery in
announcing candidacy for the U.S. presidency than in being inter-
viewed about foreign policy. Standardizing the raw motive imagery
scores on comparable samples removes such effects, making it possi-
ble to discern individual differences.