The Uncontroversial Iraq War
Saddam Hussein’s 24-year rule over Iraq comprised an almost singular reign of megalomania, mass slaughter, gangsterism, kleptocracy, and national self-destruction. Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi was more cartoonish, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad might yet rack up a higher body count, and the Kims of North Korea actually got their hands on nukes. But there hasn’t really been anyone like Saddam since. To the extent that he warrants comparison to Hitler, Hitler came as tragedy and Saddam as dark, monstrous farce.
Steve Coll’s riveting new history, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, is a definitive and surprisingly timely account of the decadeslong effort to contain or depose Saddam. As in his previous books, Coll is adept at telling a complicated historical story with dozens of characters over the course of decades while maintaining the pace of a great spy novel.`
The central question of The Achilles Trap is how Saddam and four successive American administrations, starting with Reagan, could have so fundamentally misunderstood each other, culminating in the Bush administration’s incorrect belief that Saddam retained weapons of mass destruction and the subsequent invasion of Iraq.
As Coll shows, Saddam’s false asLikewise, sumptions about American power had at least as much to do with that misunderstanding as the failures of U.S. intelligence and the U.N. inspections regime. “After 1991, Saddam assumed the CIA knew that he had no WMD, and so he interpreted American and British accusations about his supposed arsenal of nukes and germ bombs as merely propaganda lines in a long-running conspiracy to get rid of him,” Coll writes. “A CIA capable of making a gigantic analytical mistake on the scale of its error about Iraqi WMD was not part of Saddam’s worldview.”
Saddam was a paranoid man with much to be paranoid about. He believed throughout his presidency that America and the “Zionists” (in the form of Israel or a global cabal of international Jewry or both) were fixated on his destruction. That twisted ideological obsession could give him oddly prescient insights about his foes. When the CIA approached Saddam in 1982 to offer support for his disastrous war against Iran, he accepted, even though he assumed the United States and Israel were also backing the mullahs against him. When the IranContra scandal broke in 1986, revealing huge U.S. arms sales to Tehran, Saddam felt vindicated.
“I swear, I am not surprised,” Saddam told his advisers. He knew a Jewish plot when he saw one, and he saw them constantly. It didn’t matter that Iran-Contra was a debacle for the Reagan administration: “What many Americans understood as staggering incompetence in their nation’s foreign policy, Saddam interpreted as manipulative genius,” Coll writes.
Saddam was also not alone, then or now, in mistakenly seeing Israel as the cause and potential solution to all Middle Eastern problems. Coll recounts how two months after Saddam invaded Kuwait, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev thought he could still avert a wider war with the U.S. “by launching a new effort to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict,” whatever that meant.
the dream of settling the Arab-Israeli conflict through a watershed deal with a large, hostile Arab state did not begin with the Biden administration’s efforts to get Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords. In 1995, an adviser to Jordan’s King Hussein proposed to Saddam that the king travel to Baghdad with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to “enlarge the Oslo negotiations.”
Four years after Saddam received one of the most lopsided ass-kickings in the history of warfare, his response should be instructive to anyone who doesn’t understand how Hamas might yet try to claim victory in Gaza by merely staying in power. “Defeatists” like Jordan, Saddam said, “need people to be defeated with them in order to see that they are not alone in that defeat. For Iraq, this is impossible.”
Coll has access to these strikingly candid remarks from Saddam and his closest subordinates thanks to a trove of Iraqi transcripts, recordings, minutes, and other archival materials taken by Coali
tion forces after the fall of Baghdad. Some of these were previously available publicly but no longer are, while others Coll gained for the first time from the Pentagon through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The result is a rare example of a contemporary history of the Middle East where the author has at least as good if not better access to the thoughts of Arab leaders as to Israeli or American ones.
The picture of Saddam that emerges is complicated. He was a tedious, ideological, self-deluded micromanager who frequently executed subordinates for expressing minor dissent. But he could also be charming, sardonic, or even selfdeprecating, particularly when speaking to foreigners or those few Iraqis he felt were not potential threats to his rule. Future French President Jacques Chirac first met Saddam in Paris in 1975 and found him “even rather nice.”
Coll has a journalist’s eye for color in a story that might otherwise be oppressively dark, as when he describes Saddam’s parting gift of a videotape to Donald Rumsfeld at their 1983 meeting in Baghdad when the Reagan administration was pursuing better relations with Syria. “The tape showed several minutes of ‘amateurish footage,’ as Rumsfeld recalled, in which Syrian president Hafez al-Assad inspected troops and applauded. Then it depicted ‘people purported to be Syrians strangling puppies’ followed by a ‘line of young women biting the heads off of snakes.’ The tape was edited to suggest that Assad was present and applauding. The gift understandably struck Rumsfeld as bizarre.”
More than 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, it’s striking how much of The Achilles Trap feels uncontroversial, perhaps even part of an emerging political consensus. After the rise of ISIS and investigations like the United Kingdom’s Chilcot inquiry, one can now say on the one hand that Bush didn’t “lie” to bring us into war and on the other that the war was nonetheless a catastrophe of planning and execution. Finding a consensus view is made easier by the scope that Coll has chosen. Of the book’s 484 pages, fewer than 100 are devoted to the period after 9/11. By focusing on the 1980s and 1990s, it’s easier to see George W. Bush’s actions in the context of why both his father and Bill Clinton pursued regime change in Iraq, even if they stopped short of a ground invasion.
Saddam was a pariah not only because he used “special bombardments” of chemical weapons against the Iraqi people but also because he was a conventional mass murderer. “The Corps Commands shall carry out random special bombardments using artillery, helicopters and aircraft at all times of day or night in order to kill the largest number of persons present,” wrote “Chemical” Ali Hassan al Majid in a 1988 directive to gas Kurdish civilians. “All persons in these villages shall be detained because of their presence there, and they shall be interrogated by the security services, and those between the ages of 15 and 70 must be executed.” About 100,000 Kurds were gassed, bombed, or shot in the 1988 massacre.
But the failure to find WMD in Iraq also seems less scandalous in a world where Bashar al Assad was allowed to stay in power despite crossing the chemical “red line” set by the Obama administration and where Yemen’s Houthi rebels are now lobbing heavily modified SCUD missiles, provided by Iran, at Israel. Cutting the other way, the very concept of “WMD” has been sufficiently tainted by the Iraq fiasco that when rogue states and terrorist groups actually possess and use WMD, it doesn’t register as a global threat.
The somewhat clunky title of The Achilles Trap refers to a mistaken belief that an adversary has a simple, low-cost weakness that can bring about their destruction. Saddam believed in 1990 that the U.S. would fold over Kuwait if the U.S. suffered even minor casualties, while the U.S. thought Saddam was one rogue general’s coup attempt away from losing power. Today, as excellent books surveying the recent history of Middle Eastern power politics and war emerge, it seems worth asking which Achilles traps Hamas and Iran have fallen into about Israel and the U.S. and which we’ve fallen into about them.