Saddam Hussein was known for wielding many notorious instruments of power; the pen was not one. But the Iraqi tyrant had a penchant for composing literature, if that’s the word I want, in the service of national and Baathist propaganda.

Hussein’s literary endeavors—his “secret garden,” as his press secretary referred to his furtive scribblings—took the form of crude narratives expressed in a discursive style replete with Arabic proverbs and Koranic verses. His literary output did not produce refined poetry or prose, but the author’s absolute power ensured a wide domestic distribution. The principal themes of Saddam’s fables were not hard to discern: the existence of a foreign conspiracy to subjugate the Arab people; the need for violent resistance to thwart that conspiracy; and the nobility of death in that cause.

In March 2003, amid the collapsing scenery of a morbid regime in its denouement, Hussein worked at a frenetic pace to complete a work of fiction. He put the finishing touches on an allegorical historical novel set on the periphery of the Roman Empire. His fourth and final novel was raced to the presses to rally the nation to armed insurgency (40,000 copies managed to get printed). Known under various titles, Get Out, You Damned One! tells of a noble patriarch named Ibrahim with three grandsons, who represent Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is a morality tale with cosmically evil Jews, feckless Christians, and upright Muslims. The Jew worships a bag of gold coins and practices brigandage with the backing of the imperial Romans, but his “desperate tribe” is eventually routed by a band of righteous Arab fighters.

This fable is dredged up by the journalist Steve Coll in The Achilles Trap, an engrossing history of Saddam Hussein and his long war against the Pax Americana. Hussein’s unconventional weapons programs and America’s persistent attempts to shutter them furnish the background of Coll’s story. Based on captured Iraqi records—including 2,000 hours of audio from high-level meetings that Hussein “recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon”—and interviews with former officials, Coll presents the view from Baghdad after Saddam’s rise to power, with an emphasis on the dark interregnum between the Gulf War and the final showdown a dozen years later.

However, a salient passage of Get Out, You Damned One! is omitted from Coll’s account. In the novel’s climactic sequence, Hasqil, the Jew, in an alliance with the Romans (read: the United States), has built two towers in which he stores his ill-gotten riches. The Arabs raid the towers and burn them to the ground. Saddam treats the destruction of the towers as an event ordained by God. The smoldering ruins can be seen from miles around, and the masses rejoice. Allahu Akbar, God is great, Saddam concludes.

In the shadow of September 11, 2001, this was a provocative image coming from America’s most implacable enemy. But it was of a piece with Hussein’s instinctive reaction to al-Qaeda’s attack on U.S. civil society. The day after 9/11, on state television, the tyrant declared: “The United States reaps the thorns that its leaders have planted in the world … [and] has become a burden on all of us.”

After fighting a low-grade, decade-long war with the United States, Hussein embraced the cause of holy war once it struck the American homeland. “As an advanced student of conspiracies,” Coll writes, “Saddam was susceptible to the emerging Arab media discourse that 9/11 was an inside job” used as a pretext to justify war against Muslims or to bolster Israel’s position in the Middle East. This delusion was partly attributable to Hussein’s belief that he was besieged by “would-be assassins and international conspirators.” It was also attributable to his grotesque anti-Semitism, which made him an “uncompromising rejectionist” committed to Israel’s destruction. By any estimation, though, it was undeniable that the regime seated in Baghdad was a sworn foe of the United States and a permanent menace to the liberal order.

And yet Coll is loath to concede this obvious point. As a staff writer for the New Yorker and a former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, he has written widely and critically about America’s entanglements in the greater Middle East. But to his mind, no sin of commission (or, for that matter, no sin of omission) in U.S. foreign policy ranks as highly as the expedition to Iraq to depose its blood-drenched dictator. In these pages, he unburdens himself of the view that the war was not only “unnecessary” but a “catastrophe” for American interests.

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The Achilles Trap aims to show that America’s invasion of Iraq was a tragic mistake owing to a mutual misunderstanding between the belligerents. In this telling, Hussein misjudged American motives as much as his counterparts in Washington, traumatized by jihadist terror, cast his irrational and bellicose behavior in the worst possible light. Coll might have titled his work about such lethal miscalculations The Guns of March, with due apologies to Barbara Tuchman.

The actual title comes from a metaphor that informed both sides’ purported incomprehension of the other. “All strong men have their Achilles’ heel,” Hussein told a group of Arab leaders in 1990. He saw the United States as too complacent and fickle to take concerted action against his regime: “too hubristic and too afraid of taking casualties to defeat a united Arab nation.” And, by sheer coincidence, the CIA’s covert-action program against Hussein was cable-coded DB ACHILLES, for the idea that he might be ousted by popular revolt owing to his repressive apparatus of power.

In this sense, the strategic “trap” ensnaring these antagonists was set by both sides. The analytical blunders of the American side in postulating that Saddam had an active WMD program have been exhaustively documented. The conjecture of America’s governing class—reinforced by every credible intelligence service in the world—that Saddam was lying when he disavowed weapons of mass destruction because he’d possessed and used them before is already tolerably known. Coll buttresses this indictment but does not belabor it.

What repays attention is Coll’s elucidation of the recalcitrance of the other side: namely, Saddam’s. The rural tribesman from Tikrit plainly never considered the possibility that the United States, which ranged over the world like a colossus, might not actually know the truth about the condition of his arsenal. He took it as an article of faith that the CIA was all-powerful and all-knowing, as well as supremely competent. As he later told U.S. investigators about his invasion and annexation of Kuwait in the early 1990s, “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?” Saddam also figured the CIA knew he had no weapons of mass destruction. “A CIA capable of getting such a big question dead wrong on the facts,” Coll writes, “was not consistent with Saddam’s bedrock assumptions.”

“It was a pattern that would recur between Washington and Baghdad,” Coll notes. “What many Americans understood as staggering incompetence in their nation’s foreign policy, Saddam interpreted as manipulative genius.” Coll doesn’t dismiss this conspiratorial mindset out of hand. “Some of Saddam’s miscalculations seem understandable,” he observes on more than one occasion.

As we now know, Hussein’s evasiveness during weapons inspections had to do with a not-preposterous concern that the CIA was gathering intelligence for a coup. He also had no wish to signal weakness to his enemies, foreign or domestic. The combination of hostility toward the outside world and paranoia about his own domain accounted for his startling success in deceiving the world’s intelligence agencies—and his own inner circle—into believing he had weapons of mass destruction even after he had turned them into a “virtual” program, undetectable but easily reconstituted when desired.

One factor responsible for his “miscalculation” was the impunity with which he was allowed to operate for so long. The Iraqi dictator managed to escape serious consequences despite flagrant violations of the UN-supervised truce that saved him and his regime after being evicted from Kuwait. Throughout the 1990s, Hussein successfully bribed Russian, French, Chinese, and UN officials to relax sanctions.

Coll raises the question of what impact the disclosure of ample records documenting Hussein’s side might have had on the architects of regime change. The tyrant “might not have loomed as such an estranged and threatening figure,” Coll speculates, and this in turn might have stayed America’s hand. The central contention here is that a better understanding of the inner workings of Hussein’s mind would have headed off conflict with an adversary whose elimination from office, Coll does well to recall, “was written into American law, endorsed by Democrats and Republicans alike.”

Coll’s thesis seems to assume that the leader who took inspiration from Hitler and Stalin was essentially a rational actor and that containment of his regime was a viable strategy. After asking why America failed to contain Saddam Hussein in the way that it managed to deter and contain countless other wily autocrats, Coll ventures a strange answer. “It cannot be that Saddam was, by comparison with [other] difficult leaders, utterly unmanageable.” As evidence that he was a man with whom American leaders could have done business if they had tried harder, or simply been more imaginative, Coll cites the Iraqi strongman’s old habit of dispensing commercial contracts to American corporations in a bygone era of joint cooperation.

The author implies that after the Kuwait invasion, which ultimately revealed the Baathists’ atomic-bomb program, the basis for confrontation was firmly established. Over the subsequent 12 years, a rhythm of provocation took shape as a “no-fly” zone protected the Kurdish and Shia populations from extermination and the Anglo-American aircraft enforcing this policy came under constant Iraqi ground fire. Violating his pledges to comply with international weapons inspections, Hussein ran an elaborate concealment program when he did not rebuff inspectors outright. But Coll poses a counterfactual question: What if America had prevented the invasion of Kuwait in the first place? “It seems likely,” he comments, “that if the United States had been able, in the spring and summer of 1990, to clearly describe what would happen to his regime if he invaded Kuwait, he would not have done it.”

This is far-fetched. Whatever diplomatic blunders preceded the Gulf War, the argument that Hussein understood deterrence and self-preservation discounts that his lifelong strategy seemed to be of the mad-dog variety. This was a man, after all, who torched the Kuwaiti oil fields after he had surrendered them, and after he had been threatened with punitive measures if he set them ablaze. As his Republican Guard divisions were in retreat from Kuwait, Hussein launched Scuds at Tel Aviv in a mad attempt to fracture the coalition arrayed against him. (Coll is impressed at this display of restraint since these missiles were not equipped with nerve gas, and by that lenient standard it must indeed seem impressive.) After he had been spared by American power, he hatched a scheme to assassinate President Bush.

Even the evidence presented in The Achilles Trap tells against Coll’s facile counterfactuals. By exposing the nature of Baathist Iraq with forensic shrewdness, Coll lays bare a totalitarian state to its molten core. The sort of delusions and ambitions nursed by its megalomaniacal ruler ensured an inherently dangerous and unstable regime, consecrated to sadistic nihilism at home and ferocious aggression abroad. By painting Hussein as an unrepentant serial aggressor determined to rebuild his military power at any cost, Coll vitiates his own argument that the Iraqi despot could have been safely accommodated.

Coll laments the “tragic” decision to wage war to “eliminate a nonexistent WMD arsenal,” as if the threat were confined to matters of firepower. In truth, the Baathists had announced their hostile intent by firing daily on American and British planes, inciting paranoia and hatred against the United States, and bluffing about fearsome weapons. It was clear that the invasion and annexation of Kuwait was were symptoms of Saddam Hussein’s odious rule, and that he was the problem.

Even when Hussein’s capabilities and intentions remained shrouded in a “fog of fury,” any presumption of innocence extended to him sat uncomfortably with what was known about his regime and its record of predation: violating the Genocide Convention on his own territory, invading two neighboring states, openly financing suicide bombing, seeking and nearly acquiring nuclear capacity. The horror at these ghastly affronts to civilized norms, refreshed in the dark light cast by September 11, was attended by the logical presumption of future ones.

A fair appraisal of the facts, not only as they were known then but as they are known now, provided ample reason for not giving Hussein the benefit of the doubt. The paranoid and sinister character of his rule is the crucial element obscured by the habitual focus of his depleted WMD arsenal. Given that his hostility toward Israel, his suspicion of the United States, and his desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction were all genuine and, as Coll acknowledges, “unalterable” features of his personality, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Hussein was not merely an omnidirectional adversary of the international system but also a permanent one.

The Achilles Trap thus inadvertently bolsters the case that the “regime-change war” against Saddam Hussein was more or less unavoidable. The mystery is not that such a depraved and dangerous regime was forcibly deposed, but that it was permitted to remain in power for so long.

The Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu wrote of the need for strategists to “know the enemy and know yourself.” The Iraq War, Coll argues, shows what happens when neither side knows either. But in truth, each side in this long-postponed confrontation knew the other perhaps better than they realized. Better even than many Americans seem to know in hindsight.

Photo: AP/Chris Hondros/pool

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