THE ACHILLES TRAP: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, by Steve Coll
People love to imagine that world affairs are a game of chess, played by judicious leaders trying to outwit each other, acting with perfect self-knowledge and a clear understanding of what their opponent might do. But consider Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu or Yahya Sinwar. There can be a tragic mismatch between the interests of a nation and the self-interest of its leaders. The people running the show are people. They act on their whims, and with myopic agendas. They screw up. Call it the frail man theory of history.
This cosmic, unavoidable inefficiency is the real subject of Steve Coll’s excellent “The Achilles Trap,” a chronicle of the lead-up to the Iraq war. In telling this history, he offers a useful reminder that America’s omniscience is just as likely to be overestimated as are the capabilities and intentions of most world actors.
Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has written a suite of books about America’s entanglements in the Middle East. “The Achilles Trap” is clearly intended as a parallel project to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ghost Wars,” a history of the C.I.A.’s role in the wars in Afghanistan. The new book stretches from Saddam Hussein’s earliest days in power to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
At its heart lies an engrossing portrait of Hussein, which is drawn from interviews with U.S. officials, U.N. weapons inspectors and surviving members of the dictator’s government as well as what Coll calls the Saddam tapes: 2,000 hours of rarely accessed audio from high-level meetings that Hussein “recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon.” The resulting details he assembles give a more intimate picture of the dictator’s thinking about world politics, local power and his relationship to the United States than has been seen before.
The American side of the lead-up to the Iraq war has been well documented, particularly the George W. Bush administration’s megalomaniac ideologues and their intelligence failures. (And the C.I.A’.s Iraq operation was nicknamed “The House of Broken Toys” long before anyone was talking about yellowcake or slam dunks.) Coll briskly moves past those preoccupations, which he chalks up, as others have, to confirmation bias: The United States assumed that Hussein was lying when he disavowed plans to possess and use weapons of mass destruction because he’d possessed and used them before.
The richer narrative vein that Coll explores is the other confirmation bias that’s been much less understood: that of Saddam Hussein, whose great mistake was in thinking that the United States was all-powerful and always competent. As Hussein later told U.S. investigators about his occupation of Kuwait in the early 1990s, “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?” Hussein also figured the C.I.A. knew he had no W.M.D.s. “A C.I.A. capable of getting such a big question dead wrong on the facts,” Coll writes, “was not consistent with Saddam’s bedrock assumptions.”
The new material captures a trained assassin and rural tribesman who could be sharp and worldly, but was more often erratic and paranoid. He also spent a fair amount of time offering antisemitic rants to an inner circle of mostly frightened loyalists. Hussein obsessed over Israel and what he saw as the Zionist plot driving much of the West’s behavior. In the 1990s, he mocked Bill Clinton for wearing a yarmulke at Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. In 2001, when one of his cabinet ministers suggested promoting military officers who could speak Hebrew, Hussein shot the idea down, worried that when the officers met their Jewish counterparts their common language would create “a special psychological bridge between them.”
“Some of Saddam’s miscalculations seem understandable,” Coll observes dryly at one point in his history. Across the decades-long relationship between Hussein and the Americans, it must have looked to the dictator as if the United States had its hands everywhere. Washington and Baghdad were collaborators in the 1980s: The C.I.A. provided Hussein with military intelligence to help the dictator in his war with Iran, a campaign in which he deployed chemical weapons.
It was a strange alliance, not least because, as news reports eventually revealed, the United States was quietly helping Iran as well. Hussein was disillusioned. “Your relationships with the third world are like an Iraqi peasant’s relationship with his new wife,” Hussein told an American diplomat. “Three days of tea and honey, and then off to the fields for life.”
The betrayal confirmed the dictator’s impression of U.S. dealings, and so relations only suffered briefly. But, after the Cold War ended, Hussein feared that a Washington no longer checked by the Soviet Union would act even more power-hungry and he became less cooperative. The 1991 Persian Gulf war and American sanctions decimated the country. The agency’s visibility into Iraq decreased even further. C.I.A. strategy shifted away from containment and toward the hope that Hussein could be deposed in an agency-backed coup. Several follies followed. (Coll notes that Iraq’s evasiveness during weapons inspections had to do with a concern that the C.I.A. was gathering intelligence for an overthrow.)
As the relationship foundered, neither side correctly estimated the other and they both landed on the same metaphor. “All strong men have their Achilles’ heel,” Hussein told a group of Arab leaders in 1990. He saw the United States as too complacent to actually invade: “too hubristic and too afraid of taking casualties to defeat a united Arab nation, which he hoped to forge through his own leadership, against all evidence,” Coll writes.
By complete coincidence, the 1990s C.I.A.’s covert action program against Hussein was cable-coded DB ACHILLES, for the idea that the dictator might be undone by unrest led from within Iraq, where his brutal mistreatment of his own people left him exposed.
At around 500 pages — on the shorter side for a Coll book — “The Achilles Trap” is occasionally weighed down by the giddiness of a journalist with a giant stack of previously unreported items. Coll threads in the lives of several Iraqis, including that of Jafar Dhia Jafar, a CERN alum whom Hussein coerced into advancing his nuclear ambitions. This helps create a sense of what Iraqi political intrigue felt like, but the various narratives can feel a bit crowded.
Still, most of the story is vivid and sometimes even funny: In the 1980s, Iraqi officials visiting Washington made a habit of buying guns and shipping them home in diplomatic pouches. (“When the Iraqi president and his top aides considered the attractions of America, they thought of gun stores,” Coll writes.)
Hussein was proud of his rough background, though he later acquired some of the trappings of the cosmopolitan elite: He played chess and, as he aged, wrote novels. And yet, he did not have a novelist’s acute understanding of character — the flaws and misunderstandings that make depictions of humanity compelling and real — either when it came to himself, or when it came to his enemies.
That may be one reason that, well, his novels were not very good. Coll notes that the dictator, who had a digressive prose style, took only “some” of his editors’ suggestions. (He also had a Hollywood executive’s taste for I.P.-driven spectacle. One of his novels, a propagandistic parable about Iraq called “Zabibah and the King,” was staged as both a musical and a 20-part television series.)
Unlike his main character, Coll succeeds in part because he has an eye for dramatic irony. As it became clearer in the early aughts that America and its allies would invade, Hussein didn’t dial down his public rhetoric in an attempt to stave them off. In a private meeting in March 2002, as the Saddam tapes reveal, Hussein said that he did not believe a full-scale attack would happen because it would ding Bush’s popularity at home.
“Narcissism is dangerous and can cost a man the opportunity to be wise,” Coll quotes him saying. Saddam Hussein failed to understand that he might as well have been talking about himself.
THE ACHILLES TRAP: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq | By Steve Coll | Penguin Press | 556 pp. | $35
