Let’s get this out of the way first: The title of this book—The Achilles Trap—doesn’t make much sense. The subtitle—Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq—is descriptive enough, but it otherwise reads like an attempt to leverage the success of Graham Allison’s similarly named “Thucydides Trap.”
Nonetheless, it has a certain ironic resonance. Wrathful Achilles spends much of the Iliad apart from his peers raging at his leader, Agamemnon. Steve Coll, however, while also angry about a war, remains a consummate insider. His CV reads like it was written for an Aaron Sorkin protagonist: Pulitzer Prize-winning author, former dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, former director of the New America Foundation, and so on.
Coll is a critical and sharp writer, who begins from the premise that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a catastrophe. But this work proves a test of just how critical such an insider can ultimately be. This question is of more than academic interest, for the war itself was almost as much a media creation as a government one. Respectable establishment outlets from the New York Times to the Atlantic to the New Yorker helped legitimize the war. A book like this, then, functions not just as an audit, but a self-audit.
So, what kind of judgments can a chronicler of the politico-media establishment render while remaining fundamentally a member of it? As detailed as the account here is, the analysis is ultimately limited by the rhetorical positions the author is prepared to take. Coll identifies numerous failures, but his framework requires him to treat these primarily as policy failures, rather than something more fundamental.
As a narrative history, however, the book is often excellent. Coll ably synthesizes both new and existing sources into a fluid narrative covering over four decades and spanning multiple regions of the world. And it’s a truly fascinating story, from the gangsterism of the Tikriti clans that Hussein carried into the presidential palaces; to the colorful (and often unscrupulous) operators in exile, like former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi and former Iraqi Vice President Ayad Allawi; to the clash of personalities that drove the decision-making of the world’s only superpower after 9/11.
The real scoop here is the remarkable trove of papers and recordings in Iraq that Coll draws on to offer new insight into Hussein’s decision-making and the character of his rule. Here, we see an almost classical portrait of the tyrant in action—capable and resourceful in many respects, and yet fundamentally paranoid and cruel, reliant upon force and fraud to sustain his position. In fact, the research and reporting here are so impressive that they likely impacted the book’s analysis, leading Coll to assign perhaps undue importance to Hussein’s choices in determining certain outcomes that Coll describes in the book as an attempt to “enlarge the story of the 2003 invasion’s origins by elevating Saddam’s side of the conflict.”
What, then, do we learn of that side? Former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser famously said, “The genius of you Americans is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.” Hussein never quite reached this understanding of U.S. intentions. Though capable of shrewdness and far from suicidal, he remained fundamentally paranoid about the United States, whether it was during the years of tacit alliance during the 1980s or the subsequent period of enmity, leading him to bluff where candor might have served him better. And Coll suggests the two powers came to mirror one another in this way as they became adversaries, with ultimately tragic results when the United States launched its invasion of Iraq in pursuit of by-then-nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
This is the dynamic of perception and misperception that Robert Jervis famously laid out in the helpfully titled Perception and Misperception in International Politics. One can see the appeal of this narrative—two states locked in conflict by logics of fear and what Coll calls a “failure of comprehension.”
But while Coll’s central focus on the bilateral relationship between the United States and Iraq provides insight, it also risks missing the forest for the trees. The forest in this case is the global system as a whole, over which the United States enjoyed unrivaled post-Cold War dominance during the years leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. So, while it’s true that Hussein both misled and misread the United States, it is truer still, or at any rate more salient, that the United States, with its world-spanning capabilities and commitments, elected to bring so much attention and anxiety to bear upon a third-rate power like Iraq.
In other words, from the end of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers proved unable to define national interests and set global priorities, with the result being that there was no way to articulate why one region or country merited more attention than any other. This strategic fuzziness at the highest levels concerning both the relative importance of the Middle East and the United States’ goals within it persisted throughout the 1990s. By the time 9/11 hit, path dependency alone had already elevated Iraq’s significance for the U.S. government beyond any reasonable proportion. Vague hopefulness with respect to its goals was replaced by false clarity.
None of this, however, can really be attributed to either Hussein’s dangerous games or the diplomatic dynamic between the two countries. So, while it’s true that each consistently misread the other’s fundamental intentions, the problem of misperception is ultimately neither sufficient nor necessary to explain what happened in the spring of 2003.
The “cascade of errors” explanation better accounts for the 1991 Gulf War, which neither side really wanted. Coll presents a lucid account of that history as well, which, among its strengths, justly defends then-Ambassador April Glaspie from the unfair blame she bore in the aftermath of Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
Nonetheless, there are limits to the book’s explanatory power in that case as well. It is true that the United States failed to deter Iraq from invading Kuwait. But aside from the fact that almost no one—including the other Arab leaders—anticipated it, the book’s telescopic view causes Iraq on the eve of Hussein’s decision to invade to appear far larger and more significant from a global standpoint than it really was. Recall that in August 1990, the Tiananmen Square massacre was barely a year old, the Soviet Union had not yet dissolved, and the reunification of Germany was still underway. Even after the invasion of Kuwait, it was hardly self-evident that the (first) Bush administration would conclude that it warranted a U.S. response of such magnitude.
By contrast, the drive to war during the 18-month period between the 9/11 attacks and the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom was such that it is difficult to envision a plausible counterfactual in which war might have been avoided. Indeed, Coll’s estimable reporting makes clear—in some ways in spite of his larger thesis—that there was no plausible evidentiary standard that would have satisfied U.S. leaders as to the veracity of Hussein’s claims, and this was already true during the Clinton presidency.
In other words, while this was to some extent a story of misread intentions and confirmation bias, it is more fundamentally a story about the beliefs that U.S. policymakers held about the world, all of which intensified dramatically following the 9/11 attacks. Specifically, they believed that bad regimes and bad leaders represented the greatest source of international threats; that U.S. policy should focus on replacing both as needed; and that the benefits of doing so might exceed the costs. The events of 9/11 had the effect of inverting those hopes and fears.
Everything else flowed from this suspension of prudence, including the CIA’s miscalculations, which are the other major focus of this book. But in emphasizing procedural errors over the more fundamental failures of strategy and geopolitical thinking, Coll is blunting the force of his critique at the outset. He allows us to see how dubious the analyses of Hussein’s capabilities and intentions really were, but not why they seemed so compelling to both U.S. policymakers and the majority of the wider public at the time (nor, for that matter, why the media apparatus amplified so many of the most dubious analyses).
Consequently, while his work usefully fills in much of the “how” and “what” for the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, the question of “why” goes curiously unanswered. Coll rightly highlights the role of both neoconservative democracy-promoters (Paul Wolfowitz) and aggressive militarists (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, et al.) in the decision to ultimately invade, but even here his account elides just how popular that decision actually was, at least initially. Many people both in and out of government found themselves supporting the invasion despite having little knowledge of the technical requirements for a functioning WMD program or Hussein’s misrepresentations of same.
One suspects that addressing the “why” question would require a more comprehensive examination of the flaws in how the policymaking establishment saw—and perhaps in many ways still sees—the world and America’s place in it. To acknowledge, in other words, just how crazy the United States allowed itself to get during that time, and just how few geostrategic guardrails it had to constrain those impulses, is another matter. The book is well-named, if only accidentally: Though we gave it other names and sought to channel it productively, our Achillean rage burned its way across the Middle East and Central Asia, where many of its fires are burning still.
The post Why Did America Stumble Into a Trap in Iraq? appeared first on Foreign Policy.
