“ For assessing Saddam Hussein, there is very little verbal material available. What is available has probably been selected, edited, and otherwise controlled to an unknown but considerable extent. The researcher’s problem is thus to find any usable material at all.” (Winter in Post 2005 383 pdf) Political, psychological profiling offers the opportunity for understanding more about leaders and their decisions. The last two and half decades have produced new theories of leader decision-making by examining and comparing cognition and affect. (McDermott 2004, 183) Testing the various ways in which emotions impact cognitive processing and vice versa, researchers have found, particularly Sasley, (2010), that heuristic effects, or the amount of emotional attachment a leader has towards a foreign policy object, strongly impacts that leader’s decisions regarding that foreign policy object whether it be an issue, a physical person, a geographic marker such as a country, or an ideology. The case of Saddam Hussein, the late and former dictator/president of Iraq, had his emotional triggers. Following the work of Post, Winter, and Hermann, the profile of Hussein as a malignant narcissist assumed that his primary emotional trigger or attachment were those foreign policy objects that required his messianic role as the savior of Iraq to act. Interviews conducted after his capture by FBI Special Agent G. Piro in 2004 provide examples of several of the problems with methodologies attempting to assess from a distance, the emotional triggers, and reactions of leaders. The following paper provides a summary of some of the relevant points in Post’s political profile of the leader during three periods of crisis in Hussein’s life and in the history of Iraq. Following the findings of Davies (qtd. in McDermott 185) that biological reactions to stress and the need for survival create the most intense intersection between emotions, cognitions as reflected in biological markers of tension etc. are difficult to assess at a distance. However, using the interviews conducted by Piro in 2004 ( Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI ), the conclusion of Post and others that Hussein’s emotional trigger was his identification of himself as a needed messianic figure for his country may be challenged. The paper argues that it is likely that it was not his role as a messiah to his country nor to his Ba’athist ideological beliefs but rather was triggered by a schema based on his hatred and fear of Iran. In addition, the paper will argue that the interviews highlight two of the problems with at-a-distance profiling of leaders and identifying heuristic affects, that of profiler/interviewer/analyst bias and ‘performance.’ The interviews were conducted by one of the ‘rare’ agents able to accurately and reliably translate Arabic. Working for the George W. Bush administration, which was committed to its portrayal of Hussein as a madman with an arsenal of WMDs that justified the US invasion in 2003, Piro emphasized in his summaries, specific phrases and reactions that supported the Bush administration’s claims. However, the interviews also reveal that although Hussein was aware of the psychological profiles that had been carried out, pr