Saddam Hussein liked keeping secrets. He rarely slept in the gaudy palaces he built across Iraq, keeping aides guessing by staying in farmhouses and the homes of his bodyguards. He avoided using phones or interacting in any way with government ministers outside of secure Cabinet meetings.
In the months leading up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, Saddam kept his plans concealed from all but the top generals in the Republican Guard. Steeped in the world of counter-intelligence, the dictator believed subterfuge was essential to maintaining his grip on power and thwarting his enemies, both real and perceived. “In his worldview,” writes Steve Coll in The Achilles Trap, “nothing was ever quite what it seemed.”
Saddam’s deceptions backfired. For years after international arms inspectors discovered the regime’s secret nuclear-weapons program, Saddam refused to come clean about whether Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.), despite having ordered much of the arsenal destroyed. The regime’s mendacity “conditioned American and European governments to believe that Saddam would never stop trying to deceive.... The result became a self-perpetuating cycle of mutual confusion and misjudgment.”
As detailed in this voluminously researched and compulsively readable book, the cat-and-mouse game put the U.S. and Iraq on an inexorable path toward conflict that culminated in President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion—a decision that, more than two decades later, “still looks like a catastrophe.”
“In [Saddam Hussein’s] worldview, nothing was ever quite what it seemed.”
The narrative of The Achilles Trap focuses less on the human and strategic costs of the U.S. military’s adventure in Iraq—extensively chronicled by George Packer, Tom Ricks, and Dexter Filkins, among others—than on the mixed signals and missed opportunities that characterized the quarter-century leading up to it.
Coll traces the Reagan administration’s efforts to cultivate Saddam as a stable oil supplier and ally against Iran’s theocratic rulers, only to secretly sell arms to Tehran in exchange for the release of American hostages. Reagan’s double-dealing fueled the dictator’s mistrust of the U.S., which grew into all-out paranoia once President George H. W. Bush amassed a multinational coalition to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait—even though Washington had turned a blind eye to far worse acts of Saddam’s aggression, such as his use of chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds. “If you didn’t want me to go in,” Saddam asked U.S. officials after his capture in 2003, “why didn’t you tell me?”
The Achilles Trap is based on interviews with key officials and intelligence operatives, as well as previously undisclosed transcripts, audio files, and meeting minutes drawn from roughly 2,000 hours of tapes recorded by Saddam, documenting his regime’s inner workings. Similar to Ghost Wars, Coll’s 2004 history of the C.I.A.’s encounters with Osama bin Laden before 9/11, the action is cinematic, moving from the Situation Room to the mountains of Kurdistan to the sixth floor of the C.I.A.’s original headquarters in Langley, Virginia—home to the Iraq Operations Group, an 18-person outfit tasked with recruiting Iraqi exiles and defectors to overthrow Saddam.
The agency’s feckless attempts to foment a coup are a tragicomic subplot. Fear of getting caught by the tyrant himself was enough to dissuade any would-be assassin. Saddam would “drill through his kneecaps, burn him in acid, slaughter his family, wipe out his village, and throw salt onto the ground so nothing grows,” lamented one C.I.A. official. “I can’t compete with that.”
The regime’s mendacity “conditioned American and European governments to believe that Saddam would never stop trying to deceive.... The result became a self-perpetuating cycle of mutual confusion and misjudgment.”
Coll’s book includes plenty of examples of Saddam’s cruelty and lust for vengeance, even against members of his own family. Yet the picture that emerges is of a more confounding figure, a power-obsessed but pedantic strongman who wrote romance novels in his spare time, corrected state-TV presenters for grammatical mistakes, and agonized over the failings of his eldest son, Uday.
By the eve of the U.S. invasion, Saddam had long since abandoned his weapons programs and ambitions for regional hegemony. Iraq possessed little if any capacity to threaten the U.S. or its allies. Saddam nevertheless allowed the West—and even his closest aides—to labor under the illusion that Iraq still had W.M.D.
“He calculated honesty would not pay,” Coll writes. He did so out of vanity and an instinct for deceit, but also because he assumed the Bush administration knew he was bluffing and would never be so reckless as to launch a war of choice in the heart of the Arab world.
It was a fatal mistake. “Just as ‘confirmation bias’ misled America,” Coll writes, “it caused Saddam to misread Washington’s claims about his WMD…. A C.I.A. capable of getting such a big question dead wrong on the facts was not consistent with Saddam’s bedrock assumptions.”
On December 30, 2006, after three years in U.S. custody, Saddam was executed by a new Iraqi government made up of many of the political rivals he had once tormented. The war he inadvertently provoked would kill or maim thousands of U.S. service members, erode America’s military power, and destroy much of its moral authority.
“The American hand that carries the weapons and stick while dealing with the world today will weaken in two years, five years, fifteen years, or twenty years,” Saddam predicted to a visiting diplomat in 2002. “And it has started to happen now.”
Who, in the end, could argue with him?
Romesh Ratnesar is on the editorial board for Bloomberg Opinion. He covered the aftermath of the Iraq invasion for Time and served in the U.S. Department of State from 2015 to 2017
