Review The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America’s Invasion Of Iraq

Coll, Steve, The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America’s Invasion Of Iraq, Penguin Press, 2024

 

Twenty years after the Iraq invasion a comprehensive book including both the US and Iraqi perspectives on what led to the conflict has finally been published. That’s thanks to Steve Coll and his The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America’s Invasion Of Iraq. The author traces U.S.-Iraq relations from the Iran-Iraq War to the 2000s to show how the two countries constantly misread each other leading to false assumptions and the eventual overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

 

Coll begins his story in the 1980s when the U.S. first reached out to Saddam. The Reagan administration was afraid Baghdad would lose the Iran-Iraq War so offered intelligence on Iran in 1982. Washington came up with the idea that it could make Iraq an Arab ally in the Middle East and moderate Saddam who’d talked about overthrowing the Gulf monarchies to spread a Baath revolution. The author points out that the U.S. had no real understanding of Saddam other than he was a dictator. The Iraqi leader on the other hand was always weary of the U.S. even after accepting its aid. He believed that the Americans and Israelis were arming Iran to bleed both sides. His conspiratorial ideas were confirmed with the Iran-Contra Affair. 

 

After the Iran-Iraq War the Bush administration continued to reach out to Saddam and ignored his increasingly bellicose stance before the invasion of Kuwait. Saddam for example, threatened to burn half of Israel with chemical weapons and accused Kuwait, the UAE, and the U.S. of conducting economic warfare against it which he would not let stand. President Bush’s response was a series of messages that America wanted to expand economic relations and that it had no stance on Iraq’s disputes with its neighbors. The White House still had the false belief that Saddam could be made a friend. President Bush was therefore shocked when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 only because he had an image of Saddam not based upon his actions. Iraq was then made into a pariah state and Saddam was painted as a threat to the Middle East which would persist until 2003.

 

The book argues the real turning point was the U.N. inspections in the 1990s. Iraq refused to admit that it had a WMD and nuclear weapons program and carried out a deception campaign against the United Nations. When Iraq eventually destroyed everything it did so in secret keeping no record of it which meant it could never prove it disarmed. Not only that but Saddam believed the U.S. was omnipotent and knew that Iraq had nothing left and was therefore only continuing with the inspections to attack his regime. There was no reason to cooperate because there was no payoff and the inspectors were kicked out in 1998. Iraq’s refusal to come clean about its weapons led America to believe that Saddam was hiding them and he could never be trusted. This was a major cause of the 2003 invasion.

 

After 9/11 President Bush was afraid of another terrorist attack. Because Iraq had been a problem for the last decade he worried that Saddam would give WMD to terrorists and therefore he had to be dealt with. The image persisted that Saddam was untrustworthy and had banned weapons. Things like a new round of U.N. inspectors were meant to give the United States the justification for war. Coll called the invasion a catastrophic decision based upon exaggeration of Iraq as a threat and fearmongering. His detailed history explains the background to just how President Bush’s ideas were shaped by the previous twenty years of U.S.-Iraq relations where neither side really understood each other leading to one mistake after another.

 

The Achilles Trap is a hefty book at almost 500 pages but Coll was a former journalist so it is a very easy read. Each chapter is broken down into stories rather than coming off like an academic history. His thesis is convincing and is especially well done because it relies upon the trove of Iraqi documents that were captured after 2003 along with interviews with high regime officials. Including the Iraqi side gives a much fuller picture of the divergent views Baghdad and Washington had of each other which led to conflict. It should be a must read for anyone that hopes to understand the Iraq War.

 

Link to all of Musings On Iraq’s book reviews listed by topic