A Terrible Mistake

Twenty years before Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld helped lead the George W. Bush administration’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, he traveled to Baghdad to meet with the country’s autocratic leader, Saddam Hussein. It was 1983, and the CIA had recently begun covertly sharing battlefield intelligence with Iraq about Iranian troops, helping Saddam stave off defeat in the bloody war he had foolishly launched against Tehran in 1980. This assistance against a mutual enemy had started to thaw American relations with Iraq, which had been strained in the 1970s by the Arab wars with Israel, the OPEC oil embargo, and Baghdad’s engagement with Moscow. Hoping to build on the new ties, President Reagan had dispatched Rumsfeld—then a business executive with a prominent Republican Party background who had served in Congress and as a senior official in the Nixon and Ford administrations—as a special envoy. He brought with him a friendly letter to Saddam signed by Reagan and a gift of golden horse spurs.

In the years that followed, writes the journalist Steve Coll in The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, the Reagan administration embarked on “a dark and cynical chapter in American policymaking.” The United States turned a blind eye to and at times actively helped obfuscate Iraq’s use of poison gas—an internationally banned weapon of mass destruction—against both Iranian soldiers and Kurdish villages; in Coll’s assessment, from 1984 to 1988 the US “not only accepted but also effectively collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons” even as “Washington continued to insist, in public, that it condemned chemical-weapon use by any and all.” At the same time, the Reagan administration was secretly and illegally supplying weapons to Iran as part of what became known as the Iran-contra affair. When exposed in 1986, this double-dealing fueled Saddam’s paranoia about the US and became a crucial factor in what Coll describes as the Iraqi dictator’s “fevered, confusing experience of the CIA as an ally, enemy, and manipulative force in the Middle East.”

A downward spiral followed, from Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to the Gulf War and its ambiguous, festering aftermath of a no-fly zone and disputes over United Nations weapons inspectors, before culminating in a final confrontation the Bush administration engineered over what turned out to be false accusations that Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. As the 2003 invasion of Iraq neared, grainy archival footage resurfaced of the younger versions of the two future adversaries shaking hands—Rumsfeld with his slicked-back hair, square-shouldered power suit, and 1980s CEO glasses, Saddam with his prominent mustache and ostentatious green military fatigues. The footage emanated a sense of complicated historical significance, even if what it all added up to was not precisely clear.

Something similar could be said about the larger story Coll tells of the long, twisting, and mutually confused relationship between the United States and Iraq. It ranges from Saddam’s rise to dictatorial power in 1979, soon after which he started a covert nuclear weapons research program, to the 2003 invasion; a coda covers his execution in 2006 before a jeering audience chanting slogans that showed they were more loyal to a militant Shia cleric than to the fragile new Iraqi government. The Achilles Trap marches through a long series of events that show how the US ended up at the point where the Bush administration made what, in hindsight, is recognized across ideological lines as a terrible geopolitical mistake.

Unsurprisingly, Coll is unsparing in his assessment of the Bush team and the chorus of media and think-tank neoconservatives who beat the drums for war. But his book also complicates the blame game by forcing the reader to grapple with how tensions between the two countries had been building for years under a shifting array of American decision-makers from administrations of both political parties. The impression one takes away is that even if President Bush had not launched a full-scale invasion in March 2003 and instead continued to pursue a policy of containment, sooner or later some other violent and unhappy outcome might still have been inevitable. Indeed, Coll’s analysis names as “the catastrophic turning point” not Bush’s invasion of Iraq but Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which set the stage for the dozen years of adversarial entanglement leading up to Bush’s ill-advised attempt at a resolution.

Looming over this saga is the reader’s acute dread of what followed: the envisioned quick war to oust Saddam’s regime instead became a grinding counterinsurgency against Islamist zealots who eventually evolved into ISIS, which metastasized across the border into Syria while sending ultraviolent tentacles around the world. According to a study by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the two decades of warfare in Iraq and Syria cost American taxpayers some $2.9 trillion, counting military operations, humanitarian assistance, and costs like veterans’ care and interest on the portion of the national debt attributable to direct wartime spending. About half a million Iraqis and Syrians—and about eight thousand American troops and contractors—were killed.¹

The primary beneficiary of that carnage has been Iran, which—in a reversal of the CIA’s help to Baghdad during the Iran–Iraq War—saw the US topple its regional counterweight for it. And to the extent that Iraq has become a semifunctioning semidemocracy for now, it is hardly one in the mold the neoconservatives envisioned. One of the arguments put forward by backers of the invasion was that replacing Saddam’s dictatorship with a democracy would help resolve the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a vision that is a mirthless joke from the ugly vantage point of 2024. But even putting aside how the current Israel–Hamas war has sunk that conflict to a new nadir, it is worth reflecting, in light of those old pro-war arguments, on the fact that Iraq’s parliament in 2022 exercised its democracy by passing a law that prohibits Jews from joining the Iraqi military or having public sector jobs and imposes penalties up to a death sentence on activities promoting the normalization of relations with Israel.

Back in 1983, when Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad on his optimistic mission to forge closer ties between the US government and the Iraqi regime, he met first with Saddam’s deputy, Tariq Aziz. They talked for two and a half hours, Aziz smoking Cuban cigars and Rumsfeld Chesterfield cigarettes, and agreed that it was in both their countries’ interests to limit Syria’s ambitions and to contain Iran, according to notes of their meeting cited by Coll. When Aziz spoke of past ties between Iraq and the West, Rumsfeld remarked that it was “unnatural” for a generation of Americans and Iraqis to grow up without knowledge of one another. The next day, Coll writes, when Rumsfeld met with Saddam to discuss resuming full diplomatic ties, he was delighted when the Iraqi dictator played back the line he had used with Aziz: “Having a whole generation of Iraqis and Americans grow up without understanding each other,” Saddam said, “could lead to mix-ups.”

There have been many books published over the past two decades about the Iraq War and its violent and destabilizing consequences. In contributing an accessible prequel to the tragedy, Coll is following a journalistic-historical strategy he has successfully used before. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and former dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Coll is professionally best known for his masterful 2004 book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, which won a Pulitzer Prize.² The Achilles Trap serves as a companion of sorts to Ghost Wars, since the period that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was largely defined by the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which became a disaster in its own way.

While Ghost Wars was written in the immediate aftermath of September 11 and the start of the Afghanistan War, The Achilles Trap arrives two decades after the climax to which it builds. This time gap has both advantages and downsides. There is a trade-off in journalistic accounts of near-contemporary events: the more recent these events are, the more valuable and urgent information about them is, but as time passes more and better information becomes available. A greater distance from events, moreover, allows for subsequent experience to better illuminate them. In the 1990s, for example, as the Clinton administration was enforcing a no-fly zone to protect Kurds in northern Iraq from Saddam while jousting with him over UN weapons inspectors’ access to sensitive sites, it was common to hear criticism of President George H.W. Bush’s decision to end the Gulf War after one hundred hours rather than pushing on to Baghdad to oust the dictator. But after the fiasco that followed his son’s invasion to remove Saddam, the old man’s prudence looked a lot better.

For all the rightful celebration of Ghost Wars in its day, so much new information about the events leading up to September 11 has gradually come to light that it may no longer be the go-to book on its subject. The Achilles Trap seems more likely to endure as the definitive account of the events that culminated in the 2003 Iraq War. It is based, Coll tells us, on more than a hundred interviews, mostly with surviving participants; meeting notes and memoranda; oral histories, diaries, and memoirs; the accumulated work of other journalists and scholars over the years; and transcripts of meetings inside Saddam’s government from tapes seized by American troops. These transcripts—some of which had been available before but primarily in a more raw or scholarly form,³ and some of which Coll liberated via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit—document what Saddam was saying internally at various critical moments in his long saga of conflict with the US.

The result is a character-driven investigative narrative of “how this failure of comprehension unfolded,” through the eyes not just of American policymakers but also of the megalomaniac authoritarian leader himself. The portrait of Saddam that emerges from Coll’s artful telling is that of a world-historical figure who careened capriciously between cruelty and generosity, shrewdness and naiveté, cold-eyed realism and paranoid conspiracy theory–mongering. “Saddam was much more than his development plans or his secret police,” Coll writes. He

would prove to be a leader of immense energy, self-confidence, restless suspicion, and unpredictability. He was a dogmatic revolutionary who had imbibed the sweeping idealism of 1960s pan-Arabism. He could lose himself in long monologues about postcolonial revolutionary politics in countries from Algeria to Cuba to Ethiopia to Yemen. He was capable of both cunning insights about his adversaries and dumbfounding blindness about global affairs—sometimes in the same conversation. He harbored ambitions as a writer and a patron of the arts. And he was the continually beleaguered patriarch of an extended family that was becoming Iraq’s next royal family, whose members chronically abused their privileges. From one day to the next, the president was not always easy for even his nearest relatives or Baath Party comrades to understand.

Far away in Washington, D.C., where generations of overly confident foreign policy hands thought they could manage Saddam and his Iraq, misunderstandings were endemic.

Coll’s choice of title appears to be a play on the intellectually fashionable concept of “the Thucydides trap,” a destabilizing pattern in which the risk of war increases when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing one. Thucydides was an Athenian historian and military general who wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, and the phrase invoking his name is associated with the Harvard political scientist Graham T. Allison’s analysis of tensions between the United States and China.⁴ Fortunately war has not yet broken out between those two countries, but the US has been more or less continuously at war in Iraq for three decades. Where Allison is putting forth a warning, then, Coll is explaining a trap into which America has already fallen.

In place of Thucydides, however, Coll invokes Achilles, the mythical Greek hero who slew Hector during the Trojan War but then was felled by an arrow shot through his heel, the only part of his body that was not magically invulnerable. In the 1990s, Coll tells us, the CIA used Achilles as part of a code name for an unsuccessful covert program aimed at fomenting a coup against Saddam. It is not obvious that there is any deeper parallel here equivalent to the depth of insight in Thucydides’ suggestion that Athens’ rise made war between it and Sparta all but inevitable. Having nevertheless borrowed the resonance of Allison’s phrase, Coll strains a bit to endow his title with some larger meaning:

Saddam himself had cited the Achilles myth while rallying Arab neighbors in 1990 to his coming war against America. For both the Iraqi dictator and the CIA, the example of the Homeric hero with a vulnerable heel offered a call to action, despite long odds. Saddam regarded America as 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. The CIA’s operatives and leaders embraced hope over experience as they searched for a coup plan that might work.

In revisiting the fading headlines of America’s toxic relationship with Saddam-era, pre-war Iraq, Coll offers several reappraisals that challenge the conventional understandings of what happened. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, for example, the American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, was blamed for having supposedly given a tacit green light to the Iraqi dictator, on the basis of transcripts of a meeting a week earlier in which she said the US had no opinion about the border dispute. Coll is among those who think she has been unfairly scapegoated, citing evidence that Saddam had already decided to invade before their meeting and arguing that it was the Bush administration as a whole that failed to recognize what the Iraqi dictator was up to until it was too late:

Because of her occasional soft-sounding remarks, Glaspie would be blamed by pundits, members of Congress, and some of her own colleagues for failing to prevent a costly and disruptive war that would lead, in its aftermath, to cascading disasters for Iraq and the United States. She missed opportunities, but the blame heaped upon her was grossly unjustified…. In missing Saddam’s signals, Glaspie did no worse than anyone else in the senior ranks of the Bush administration.

The ambassador would nonetheless become, in just a week’s time, a convenient scapegoat for the sudden, unanticipated failure and collapse of American policy toward Saddam’s Iraq from the CIA’s secret opening in the summer of 1982 until the summer of 1990.

A common takeaway from the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War, when Iraqi Kurds revolted against Baghdad and Saddam brutally put down the rebellion, was to blame President George H.W. Bush for having encouraged and then abandoned them. Coll here is nuanced:

It seems likely that retreating Iraqi soldiers and furious citizens would have risen up even if President Bush had not called upon them to do so. And it is true that the president’s calls to the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands did not contain an explicit promise that America would intervene to help them. But these caveats are hardly exculpatory…. Unarguably, the administration had failed to anticipate and plan for the entirely plausible scenario that it confronted, thus contributing to a tragedy that would echo across generations and color darkly the attitudes of many Iraqis toward the intentions and good faith of the United States.

Coll is scathing about how the George W. Bush administration, drunk on a post–September 11 hubristic vision of remaking the Middle East, drove toward its decision to take the US into a war of choice justified by exaggerated and inaccurate assessments of Iraqi weapons. The sorry greatest hits of that era, too, are all here: Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, the Downing Street memo (“intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”), the con man Iraqi defector known as Curveball, who invented eyewitness claims of mobile biological weapons labs, and all the rest of it. But Coll also thinks it has been too easy for official Washington to place the blame for its own failures on the machinations of Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, citing the Republican Congress’s passage of a bill declaring that American policy was to overthrow Saddam, which President Clinton signed into law for reasons of political opportunism. “Chalabi would later be credited with conning America into war,” Coll writes.

Yet he was pushing on an open door. To overestimate his importance risks scapegoating a foreigner with an accent and ignoring the responsibility—even eagerness—of Republican and Democratic members of Congress, aspiring cabinet members, and think-tank writers. Chalabi was a prop for ideologues who sought to expand the uses of American military power after the Cold War, as well as by politicians who identified Iraq as a winning campaign issue.

At its heart, The Achilles Trap is a book about uncertainty, confirmation bias, and the fog of intelligence assessments that seek to make sense of imperfect information. Coll dissects one episode after another in which hindsight makes clear that decisionmakers from Baghdad to Washington were blindly fumbling for decades. The motif that emerges is how a chronic series of misunderstandings on both sides helped envelop the two nations in an ill-starred relationship.

While some of these events were significant in themselves, many more only seem significant because of what followed. Reading about the latter sort leaves one with the suspicion that similar miscues—Americans not fully understanding what they are looking at and locals misreading American intentions and actions—must be happening in countries around the world all the time. Usually such miscues probably end up not mattering much, like in an episode of Veep. Here the recitation of a generation of confusions is grim rather than comical, and many of the small-scale incremental developments Coll compiles loom larger in retrospect because of our knowledge that they were steps on the path to a war that would have such terrible and lingering consequences.

The year after the Gulf War, for example, as the UN sent into Iraq weapons inspectors who discovered Saddam’s effort to develop a nuclear bomb, his regime carried out “the rapid destruction of clandestine nuclear-, chemical-, and biological-weapons facilities before the UN could confirm their true purpose.” But crucially, the apparatchiks put in charge of the effort to dispose of a huge stockpile of chemical warheads and precursor chemicals did so in secret and kept no records, photographs, or other forms of proof documenting their destruction. All this would later fuel momentous suspicions: even when the Iraqi government stopped lying and tried to come clean, it was impossible to prove beyond any doubt that it was not still engaged in a cover-up:

The decision to secretly destroy large sections of Iraq’s WMD stocks and infrastructure without keeping good records would prove to be one of the most fateful events in Saddam’s—and America’s—march toward disaster. It meant that even when Iraq later sought to be honest about what had been destroyed in the summer of 1991, its officials would struggle to persuade UN inspectors. Not even the programs’ secret leaders knew fully what had been done.

“We didn’t know what was destroyed and what was not,” Jafar Dhia Jafar, a surviving member of Saddam’s regime, told Coll in an interview. “It was all a big mess.”

It is now a commonplace understanding that Western intelligence agencies did not realize Saddam was only pretending to still have stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, probably to frighten his dangerous neighbors. But Coll explores another likely layer. When UN officials showed up at certain sensitive presidential compounds for unannounced inspections and Saddam’s bodyguards went into “fight mode”—hiding items or blocking the inspectors from entering—the officials assumed that it was because the Iraqis were trying to hide stockpiles of WMDs or documentation of such programs. Knowing, as we now do, that there were no such stockpiles or active programs, Coll proposes an alternative explanation: Saddam feared the UN inspectors were there to collect intelligence aimed at future assassination or coup plots and told his bodyguards to consider them to be spies. Bill McLaughlin, a retired US special ops soldier who worked with UN weapons inspectors, told Coll:

If we had simply recognized at the time that we’re getting pretty close to the regime here, and regime survival is the most important thing in a dictatorship, we might have realized what the Iraqi motivation was.

It is particularly fascinating to read how Saddam and his government also had no understanding of the US or its Western allies. In 1992, soon after the first President Bush had led the successful Gulf War that pushed Iraq out of Kuwait and ravaged the Iraqi army, Saddam made clear over dinner with his half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, that he had no idea that there would be an election in November and that Bush might be ousted from power. Afterward Barzan, who died in 2007, “marveled at how ‘the president of a country in the condition of war with the United States of America does not know the time of the election there, who the candidates are, and how the outcome will affect the fight between himself and America,’” according to his unpublished memoir, to which Coll gained access.

Before the 2003 war, it was beyond Saddam’s imagination that the CIA might not have understood that his WMD programs and stockpiles were defunct, leading him to misread Western leaders’ expressions of anxiety about them:

Like many people in the Middle East and elsewhere, Saddam thought of the CIA as all-knowing. This contributed to his own misunderstandings of America, which were at least as profound as America’s misunderstandings of him. For instance, after 1991, Saddam assumed that 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…. 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.

And Saddam’s broader misjudgments about the US after September 11, Coll writes, caused him to waste months before finally letting UN inspectors—whom he had banished in 1998—back into Iraq in September 2002. Coll speculates that if Saddam had allowed them to return many months earlier and enabled them to visit myriad sites and see that they in fact contained no evidence of WMDs, such findings might have given greater leverage to European governments opposed to the invasion, like France, and swelled the ranks of people critical of the war in Britain and the US. “Bush might well have ordered an invasion anyway,” Coll writes,

but Blair’s position would have become more difficult. It is impossible to have confidence about this counterfactual scenario, but it can be said that by waiting until September 2002 to permit the return of inspectors, Saddam lost the initiative and allowed Washington and London time to shape how the coming inspections would be judged.

Beyond its value as a history and reappraisal of events, what lessons does this tale of ceaseless misconceptions and miscalculations hold for today? If Iraq was a trap, it was one that a succession of American policymakers clearly did not understand they were getting the country into until extricating it cleanly was nigh impossible. Coll gestures toward the difficulty of understanding dictatorial rulers whose regimes are hard for American intelligence agencies to penetrate and whose own pathologies may also make it hard for them to see the US clearly:

One recurring theme is the trouble American decision-makers had in assessing Saddam’s resentments and managing his inconsistencies. It is a theme that resonates in our present age of authoritarian rulers, when the world’s stressed democracies seek to grasp the often unpredictable decision-making of cloistered rulers, such as Vladimir Putin, or to influence other closed dictatorships, such as North Korea’s.