BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Achilles Trap’

OPINION:

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In the 21 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, the world has sought answers as to why our political and intelligence leaders blundered into strategic and moral catastrophe. In “Confronting Saddam Hussein” (2023), the eminent historian Melvyn Leffler exonerated the George W. Bush administration of deliberate deception. Rather, in Mr. Leffler’s view, the misguided war of choice stemmed from an earnest impulse to protect the country from terrorism.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll renders a somewhat harsher verdict in his latest work of narrative journalism covering decades of cooperation and conflict between Washington and Baghdad. “The Achilles Trap” winds back the clock to the Ba’ath Revolution and then proceeds inside Saddam’s presidential palaces, where the dictator held sway over underlings afraid to challenge his delusional worldview.

Mr. Coll is an accomplished chronicler of American spycraft. “Ghost Wars” (2004) was a sublime account of the CIA’s involvement in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and the pursuit of Osama bin Laden before 9/11. The follow-up volume, “Directorate S” (2018), charted the spy agency’s hunt for radical Islamists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These books demonstrate that Mr. Coll has few equals in the quality of his sources and ability to obtain classified documents. Add his storytelling flair and a cast of characters teeming with eccentric henchmen and shameless con men, and Mr. Coll has delivered another must-read book.

“The Achilles Trap” is partly based on more than 100 interviews with event participants — from clandestine operatives to Iraqi nuclear scientists. Even better, Mr. Coll obtained never-before-published audiotapes of Saddam’s internal deliberations along with loads of Iraqi government documents.

These sources make it “possible to see in new ways what drove Saddam in his struggle with Washington, and to understand how and why American thinking about him was often wrong, distorted, or incomplete,” Mr. Coll writes. They reveal a leader consumed by suspicions of foreign spies and assassination plots who failed to grasp the nature of U.S. decision-making, not least because he espoused crude conspiracy theories about all-powerful Zionists manipulating events.

This is a story of mutual misperceptions and miscalculations rarely tempered by sufficient self-reflection. But Mr. Coll argues that the “forever war” between the U.S. and Iraq was avoidable. The missed opportunities began in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War.

Amazing as this may seem today, Washington and Baghdad worked together from 1982. The Reagan White House authorized the CIA to share “satellite-derived intelligence about Iranian military vulnerabilities” to save Saddam from losing his war of aggression against the ayatollahs. Even after the regime’s genocidal gassing of the Kurds in 1988, President Ronald Reagan’s team “did not want to break with Saddam,” Mr. Coll writes.

The year before, an Iraqi warplane killed 37 Americans aboard the USS Stark in a mistaken attack. Reagan did not publicly criticize Saddam, who immediately apologized. “Saddam asked Reagan to ‘kindly convey to the families of the victims my personal condolences and sympathy,’” Mr. Coll writes. Partnership preserved. But the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986, which had exposed U.S. double-dealing, confirmed in Saddam’s mind that the Americans could not be trusted.

Because U.S. leaders “pulled their punches when Saddam gassed his enemies,” the dictator figured he might get away with invading Kuwait. Days before Saddam sent his tanks into his defenseless neighbor on Aug. 2, 1990, President George H.W. Bush sent a letter to “reassure” Iraq’s president that “my Administration continues to desire better relations with Iraq.”

“In the cascade of errors that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration’s failure to deter Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait — as well as Saddam’s failure to grasp what would happen after he acted — stand out,” Mr. Coll writes. The U.S.-led campaign to liberate Kuwait in 1991 did not end the conflict. What followed was a succession of limited wars, cruel sanctions, and U.N. weapons inspections amid the alarm caused by the discovery of Iraq’s secret (and then dormant) nuclear program.

By the time a second Bush was in the White House, Saddam was convinced the all-knowing CIA had to be aware he no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction. U.N. inspectors found no weapons. Yet both the agency and neoconservative hawks, fed false reports by a parade of con men and fabulists, held a “collective presumption” that Saddam was hiding something and, therefore, was a threat to world peace.

Top Clinton administration officials believed the same, and President Bill Clinton embraced the goal of regime change without any practical idea of how to achieve it. Did President George W. Bush and his war Cabinet lie about WMD? Lie is not the word the author chooses. Rather, they “marketed through exaggerations of available evidence and unabashed fearmongering.”

Given the consequences — the hundreds of thousands dead, maimed and displaced, the shredding of U.S. prestige — Mr. Coll’s conclusion is tough to dispute. America’s most persistent enemy might have been managed rather than eliminated. More vexing is why history’s most powerful nation thought a tin-pot dictator was worthy of attention.

• Martin Di Caro hosts the “History as It Happens” podcast at The Washington Times.

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“The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq”
By Steve Coll
Penguin Press
556 pages, $23.99