The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll — how America misread the Middle East

Is there an American president in modern political history who actually got the Middle East right?

It isn’t merely an academic question, at a time when Joe Biden is fending off increasingly pointed criticism for his inability to defuse a brutal land war in Gaza, deter missile strikes on Red Sea shipping and fend off drone attacks on American troops in Syria and Iraq.

If the author and journalist Steve Coll is to be believed, Biden would just be the latest in a long succession of Oval Office occupants who have been plagued by a mix of short-sightedness, miscalculation and outright naivety in their attempts to advance US interests in a blood-soaked and oil-rich region.

Coll, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has become something of a chronicler-in-chief of recent American geopolitical and corporate adventurism in the region, having already penned widely praised books on strategic miscalculations in Afghanistan in the lead-up to September 11 (Ghost Wars); the outsized influence of Big Oil in US foreign policy (Private Empire); and how Washington shaped the fortunes of Saudi Arabia’s most infamous family (The Bin Ladens).

His latest, The Achilles Trap, is a richly detailed tale of four US presidents and their inability to contain Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. This was a policy failure so great that it ultimately led to 2003’s spectacularly misguided American-led invasion that left hundreds of thousands dead and Washington’s greatest strategic rival in the region, Iran, with a stronger hand than at any time since the 1979 Islamic revolution. 

By reconstructing the idiosyncratic failures of successive presidential administrations, Coll avoids the sweeping policy recommendations that often litter similar “big books” about the Middle East. Instead, he seems to argue merely for a bit of humility in the face of overwhelming complexity.

The book is unsparing towards Biden’s predecessors. Ronald Reagan had the CIA provide detailed maps to Saddam to help him reverse Iranian advances at the height of the Iran-Iraq war — only to approve arms sales to Tehran at the same time (a scandal that would become the Iran-Contra affair), deepening Saddam’s paranoia about American intentions. Reagan’s successor George HW Bush, who similarly cosied up to Saddam at the outset of his administration (1989-93) to counterbalance Iran, missed multiple opportunities to send a clear signal that an invasion of Kuwait would be met with military force. 

Bill Clinton reauthorised a “covert-action plan to foment a coup against Saddam”, but then pulled the plug on CIA plots when they neared the launch stage, dooming nearly all credible Iraqi opposition figures. Coll’s book finishes on the oft-told but no less exasperating account of George W Bush’s willing blindness to the fabrications of Ahmed Chalabi and other dubious Iraqi sources, who played to the administration’s preconceived notions about Iraq’s weapons programmes and internal political dynamics. Needless to say, it’s not a happy ending.

Amazingly, Saddam had a Nixonian obsession with recording meetings he held with his most senior advisers

The presidential litany is so full of blunders that it leaves the reader wondering, in the immortal words of the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Indeed, if there is a weakness to Coll’s account it is his relentless second-guessing of American decision makers with not only the benefit of perfect hindsight, but also a treasure trove of newly acquired intelligence on the inner workings of Saddam’s regime. 

Amazingly, Saddam had a Nixonian obsession with recording meetings he held with his most senior advisers — recordings that remain under lock and key by US military secret keepers, who made copies of the tapes after discovering them during the 2003 invasion. A small number of the transcripts were publicly released in the early 2010s, only to be later withdrawn, but Coll was able to obtain a new trove by suing the Pentagon, enabling him to weave a narrative that shows exactly how Saddam reacted to various shifts in US policy. 

No American president had that kind of real-time intelligence, making it easy for Coll to portray successive White Houses as either tone-deaf, craven or feckless — or some combination of the three. There is no doubt that many Iraq policy decisions warrant such censure, but all of them? Perhaps policymakers got it wrong because the Middle East — with its cross-cutting religious, ethnic, economic and ideological cleavages — is simply that difficult. Coll himself acknowledges that it’s problematic to speculate on the “what-ifs” of major presidential judgments. But he engages in them nonetheless. 

Regardless of this shortcoming, The Achilles Trap — the title is a reference to the code name given to a covert CIA effort to topple Saddam — is a compelling tale even for those steeped in the sordid history of US-Iraqi relations. In addition to the insight Coll’s transcripts afford into Saddam’s thinking, his account of how close Baghdad came to acquiring a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Gulf war — and how successful UN weapons inspectors were at dismantling Saddam’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons systems following his withdrawal from Kuwait — is both chilling and infuriating. 

Coll makes a credible case that the postwar inspection regime of the 1990s was nothing less than a catastrophic success. Motivated in part to get back into the west’s good graces, but also to avoid being caught by increasingly aggressive international inspectors, Saddam’s lieutenants ordered a wholesale elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programmes in mid-1991. But it was a secret, haphazard affair, with no record-keeping, photographing or other memorialisation of what had been done. Coll quotes the head of Iraq’s abortive nuclear programme as admitting: “We didn’t know what was destroyed and what was not.”

It meant that, when future weapons inspectors arrived seeking proof of WMD dismantling, Baghdad had no evidence. “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 towards disaster,” Coll argues.

Coll’s narrative is also filled with refreshingly contrarian takes on what otherwise seems like settled history, particularly the long-praised diplomatic work by George HW Bush to weave together an international coalition to push Saddam out of Kuwait. In Coll’s telling, Saddam’s 1990 invasion could have been short-circuited if Bush had made clearer that Baghdad’s much-telegraphed offensive was unacceptable. Indeed, Coll’s rage at Bush père — and the wrongful scapegoating of underlings like April Glaspie, then the US ambassador to Iraq — veritably steams off the page: “In the cascade of errors that led to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration’s failure to deter Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait . . . stands out.” Once in US custody, more than a decade later, Saddam asked his interrogators: “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?”

By the book’s end, the 2003 invasion feels like a disastrous but inevitable coda. The story of George W Bush’s rush to war has been retold more comprehensively elsewhere. Coll’s account brings welcome nuance by showing in detail how an isolated and paranoid Saddam played right into the hands of Washington ideologues. From failing to condemn the September 11 attacks to assuming the CIA must have known his WMD programmes were long gone, Saddam made it almost too easy for the pro-war camp to paint him as a terrorist-supporting, nuclear-toting threat to world peace.

Perhaps that is as Saddam wanted it. The last we see of the Iraqi dictator is in his CIA “debriefings”, where US interrogators reported he was calm, even self-deprecating. To Coll, it was almost as if he viewed himself as a modern Napoleon, living out his days in his own St Helena, chatting with his jailers. American presidents have lived with the aftermath ever since.

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003 by Steve Coll Allen Lane £30/Penguin Press $35, 576 pages

Peter Spiegel is the FT’s US managing editor

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Letter in response to this article:

Victory over the Shah was not an ‘Islamic’ revolution / From Bill Jeffries, Vancouver, BC, Canada