The Achilles Trap
By Steve Coll
Penguin
ISBN: 978-0525562269
576pp.

The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. In The Achilles Trap, Steve Coll, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of nine books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the decisions that led to the war.

The book is based on more than 100 interviews with several individuals who had first-hand involvement in the invasion of Iraq and transcripts of tape recordings made by the regime of Saddam Hussain. This allows Coll to take a deep dive into the minds of the two men who made the war possible: US President George W. Bush and Iraqi President Saddam Hussain.

The book is a searing indictment of how Saddam governed Iraq and an even bigger indictment of Bush. Not only were some of George W.’s senior advisers opposed to the war, so also was the former President George H.W. Bush, his father. The elder Bush expressed his opposition via his former national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, who penned an editorial, ‘Don’t Attack Saddam’ in the Wall Street Journal.

Coll concludes that “The president careered toward an unnecessary war… based on unabashed fear-mongering.” None of Iraq’s neighbours wanted the US to invade Iraq, worried that it would destabilise the region.

The US did not have any evidence that Iraq had ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and Saddam assumed the CIA knew that and thus the US was unlikely to attack Iraq. The book is entitled The Achilles Trap because both sides assumed the other had a fatal weakness, which did not exist.

Washington assumed that Saddam did not have the guts to fight the US. Saddam assumed that the US would never attack Iraq because it did not have the guts to incur large-scale battlefield casualties: “Saddam thought of the CIA as all-knowing. This contributed to his misunderstandings of America, which were at least as profound as America’s misunderstandings of him.”

The CIA’s record in Iraq after 1991 “was mostly one of operational and analytical calamities.” Even within the agency, the Iraq Operations Group was known as “the ‘House of Broken Toys’.” Of course, that did not stop the CIA from being ruthless. As one observer put it, the agency was “completely prepared to burn down your house to light a cigarette.”

Bush just wanted to get rid of Saddam. When his secretary of state presented some made-up evidence on WMDs to the UN, he was met with scepticism. Iraq had no connection with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, yet the US thought it would carry out an even deadlier attack against the US.

Almost to the very end, citing new evidence, the book shows that the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was opposed to the invasion. But Bush was determined to attack Iraq to implement regime change, to turn Iraq into a Western-style democracy.

Saddam comes across as a dual-faced man wallowing in hubris. On the one hand, he had created an extensive social/welfare system within Iraq. On the other hand, he had created an equal system of terror, directed at his political opponents. If anyone dared speak against him, they could be arrested, tortured and executed within a matter of days. He did not have the slightest qualms in killing nearly 200,000 Kurds.

Soon after he came to power in 1979, Saddam plunged Iraq into a senseless war against Iran. It lasted for eight years and cost $500 billion. It left Iraq saddled with a debt of $80 billion, of which $35 billion was owed to Saudi Arabia and $10 billion to Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides.

Unable to repay the debt, Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. The US failed to anticipate Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but neither did Saddam realise that the invasion would turn the world against him. After the US captured him, Saddam left his US investigators befuddled by saying: “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?”

Equally naïve was the king of Saudi Arabia. King Fahd knew that the presence of American and European troops on Saudi soil would upset many Saudis and the clergy. But under US pressure, he caved in. Later, Osama bin Laden would capitalise on anti-Saudi sentiments to launch the 9/11 attacks. As shown in the book by Nelly Lahoud, The Bin Laden Papers, he did not expect the US would invade the Muslim world. He thought the US would withdraw from the region.

In March 2003, when the US finally attacked Iraq, Saddam invoked the “Mother of all Battles” metaphor and thought he would defeat “the treacherous criminal Bush … because this is a fight between good and evil.” He also thought the Iraqi army would go underground and fight a guerilla war on his behalf.

But there was no love lost between the conscripts and the dictator. After the US dropped 150,000 “dumb” gravity bombs, killing some 10-12,000 Iraqi soldiers, most surviving soldiers simply took off their uniforms and went home.

The book also paints a damning picture of other actors in the tragedy. King Hussein of Jordan had served as America’s lackey in the Arab world. He fancifully thought that “by helping engineer a regime change in Baghdad, he might somehow restore his own extended family’s royal rule in Iraq.”

Earlier, in 1996, Madeleine Albright, the former US ambassador to the UN, said that even though the economic sanctions imposed by the US after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had killed 500,000 Iraqi children, the price was worth it.

In April 2003, Scott McLaughlin, the former weapons inspector in Iraq and now a CIA analyst, cross-examined the head of Iraq’s nuclear programme, Jafar Dhia Jafar, and said: “We made a terrible mistake.” But that did not slow down the US invasion of Iraq, which would then turn into a multi-year occupation. More than 200,000 Iraqi civilians eventually died. More than 4,400 US servicemen died and more than 30,000 were wounded.

Early on, when Iraq was looking for nuclear weapons, its leaders would often cite the example of Pakistan, which they believed had moved to acquire a bomb to deter and balance India. An Iraqi scientist said that Iraq was at least as advanced as Pakistan and should be able to do it.

Dr A.Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, sensed an opportunity and reached out to Iraq with an offer of assistance that was spurned by Iraq, according Coll. Meanwhile, Israel, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha without the knowledge, let alone the permission, of the US.

There are several lessons to be learned from the tragic history of the Iraq War, which this book vividly brings out. First, wars, instead of solving problems, create more problems. Second, wars are often based on faulty assumptions. Third, military superiority does not guarantee victory. Fourth, the US understands the Middle East even less than the UK, which colonised the region for decades. Finally, dictators, who rule through fear, delude themselves into believing that the population would rise to support them when a war breaks out.

The book leaves some big questions unanswered, however. How competent is US intelligence about other parts of the globe, given how incompetent it was about Iraq? When will the US ever learn any lessons from the wars it wages around the globe? Is it necessary to spend nearly a trillion dollars on the US military, which exceeds the sum of the next 10 countries combined? Would that money not be better spent on human, social and economic development of the US?

Even despite these unanswered questions, the book is a great read for anyone with a serious interest in US foreign policy. It will also interest the general reader, since it reads like a thriller.

The reviewer is the author of Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan:

The Price of Strategic Myopia.

X: @ahmadfaruqui

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 13th, 2024