It is generally taken as an article of faith that the 2003 Iraq War was the single biggest American foreign policy blunder in recent history, with blowback still being felt far and wide investigations and special commissions established within weeks practically that Saddam Hussein actually did not possess the weapons of mass destruction, which were the reason for George W Bush's war. The two decade mystery about Saddam Hussein's refusal to admit that is being revealed in a breakthrough new book called The Achilles Trap. Journalist Steve Coll uncovers the story from inside Saddam's palaces, and he's joining me now to explain the dangerous assumptions on both sides that paved the way for that war. Steve Coll, welcome to the program. Thanks so it's. Honestly, it's war everywhere. It's in our consciences and our consciousness, and it's just everywhere, as we've just talked about in this entire show. I wonder whether listening to everything that's happening now. You feel that actually this this book, The Achilles Trap and the miscommunication and or maybe the deliberate misunderstandings led to a war that could have been prevented? I think in the case of Iraq, yes. No, doubt. And the misunderstanding was mutual. That's what I was reflecting on. Listening to some of the other conversations in this program is that we live in a world of conflict and that means a world of adversaries. As some of your guests have said about different conflicts, the tendency of politicians sometimes incented by their own domestic politics is to dehumanize the enemy and to caricature them. And what the story of Saddam Hussein's thinking about his WMD shows is that we did not understand who he was or why he was motivated to behave the way he did. And he didn't understand what the US knew and didn't know. And he he had his own ideas basically out of whole cloth about what America might be thinking. So first I want to ask you, okay, this is a long time coming. This as I said, we understood very shortly after the invasion that there were no WMD, but it's taken this long for us to understand Saddam in our thinking, and that's because you got access to all sorts of records. How did it take that long to make them public, or at least to you? Well, I mean, so it turns out that Saddam tape recorded his leadership conversations as assiduously as Richard Nixon. Thousands of hours. And he also kept records of his presidential office and his intelligence services. So there's a vast trove of documentation and recordings about what he was saying and thinking. He was a micromanager. He wrote in the margins of a lot of memos that he sent around. But as you say, these records are not available. They haven't generally been available. I ended up collaborating with the reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit in the US, and we sued the Pentagon, which holds them. Is that like a foir freedom of information? Precisely, yeah. In order to file the lawsuit, you initially file a request under for you, then they don't comply, then you sue them and then they settle. And that's what happened. So I got a batch of these materials that way And it's a complicated history, but essentially those records do take you inside Saddam's mind at critical points of his conflict with the United States. Well, I don't know whether we should work backward or forward. I mean, he he was wrong in the Iran-Iraq war about America in the first Gulf War, about America in the George W Bush war, about America. So what what stood out the most, let's just say, about his miscalculation that led to the invasion and his toppling? Well, he's so contradictory because he can be quite shrewd about the way the world is organized and about power. After all, he retained power under threat for 20 years. So he must know something about how to manage the threats against him. At the same time, he saw the world through a series of interlocking conspiracy theories that left him very confused about U.S. decision making or the reality of U.S. capabilities. So, for example, one reason why he didn't cooperate on WMD inspections in the run up to the war was that he believed the CIA already knew that he didn't possess any WMD because, of course, they're omniscient, they know everything. But then follow the logic since they know I don't have it. The accusation that I do is just a game to set the stage for a war that has no relation to WMD. So why should I play their game? Why should I cooperate? It's all theater. Now, that is a microcosm of a whole series of other similar beliefs that he held going back to the 1980s. And by the way, it wasn't as if he was all crazy or without evidence for some of his beliefs because we did things that were genuinely confusing for him. Well, I mean Iran Contra, you mentioned the eighties, right? So he starts a war with Iran in 1980 unprovoked and then in 1982 the Reagan administration panics, thinks he's about to lose the war. The Iranians are going to break through his lines. So they send the CIA officer to Baghdad carrying secret intelligence information to help the Iraqis see what's coming into and to prevent it. They then cooperate for years the US providing satellite pictures to Saddam all along Saddam is saying to his comrades we can see on the tapes now I don't trust this. These photos may be doctored or if they're not doctored, they're giving the same ones to Iran. His team say, Boss, you're being too suspicious. And then in 1986, as you remember, it was announced in the United States that we were in fact cooperating with the Israelis to provide the Ayatollah Khomeini with weapons and intelligence. Not so. It's literally all over. This is literally all over the place. And so there's this great tape of him after Reagan makes the speech announcing that he has in fact been secretly supporting Iran, where Saddam comes in and says, I told you so. This is the reality. There is a permanent conspiracy involving the CIA the Israelis, Ayatollah Khomeini. And by the way, Khomeini is an American project. And even in the nineties, he would refer back to Iran-Contra in explaining why he was taking a rebellious course. And in the nineties, let's say the early nineties, when, you know, I remember because I covered it, there were weeks of mounting tension and he just kept threatening and threatening and us. What did the US do? Because in your in in your documents, you say something incredible. I want you to say what you discovered Saddam Hussein. Had he been warned? You mean about going into Kuwait? Yeah. Well, and so he later said, if you didn't want me to go into Kuwait, why didn't you tell me? And this became, of course, a huge episode in American politics at the time because there was an ambassador in Baghdad, April Glass be a pioneering woman who was the first Arabist of her generation to serve at that level. And she was thrown under the bus by the Bush administration in saying that she had H.W. Bush, that she had gone in and been too soft with Saddam and had an important meeting. Well, I have now had the benefit of these records in hindsight and clearly she has been falsely accused of being responsible for this to the extent that she was two points. First, to the extent that what she said was too soft, it was written for her by the H.W. White House. I mean, so that just reading out Saddam Hussein do not cross that red line because we will oust you because we were still trapped in the in the policy of cooperation with him and George H.W. Bush being a good foreign policy president was calling all around the Arab world asking for advice. He saw the threats that Saddam was making and he would call up King Fahd and Saudi Arabia, King Hussein and Jordan, Hosni Mubarak and Egypt and say, what should I think? I'm worried. And they would all say, we got it, George. This is just a bluff. Don't get involved. It's all just putting the arm on the Kuwaitis to get some loans forgiven. Please stay away. And Bush being a kind of internationalist, believing in the advice of allies, said, okay, I'll take their advice. And it turned out it was wrong. But isn't this something you also raised the idea of miscommunication between leaders? Why didn't Bush pick up the phone and call Saddam Hussein? And then you have a very interesting we'll get to the Clinton the Clinton one and say, why didn't Bush call leader to leader? Well, he should have and he might have. In fact, at the very end, when Iraqi forces went across the Kuwait border, border into the Emirate his aides rushed to him in the White House and said, time to call Saddam. And just as they were about to do that, they got word from the CIA that Iraqi troops were already downtown Kuwait City. So Bush says, I guess it's too late for that. So now we go back to the fall of 2002. Here is George W Bush on Saddam Hussein he deceives, he delays, he denies. And the United States and I'm convinced the world community aren't going to fall for that kind of rhetoric on by him again. So we've discussed a little bit of it, but I think it's so interesting. You write a CIA capable of making an analytical mistake on the scale of its myths about Iraq's WMD. Was not part of his worldview. Yes. So and so we mentioned we talked before about how his confusion about the CIA's omniscience and omnipotence confused and misled him. But, you know, let's remember the confusing underlying story. So in 1991, after Iraqi troops were expelled from Kuwait, we now know that Saddam ordered his son in law to destroy all the WMD stocks he had. But he didn't tell anyone about what he had done. He didn't keep any records nuclear, biological and chemical, all three, all three and also missiles with the that were banned because of their long range capabilities. And so he lied to his own generals, he lied to inspectors about it and he kept no records of what he had done because he had it in his mind that he wanted to pass inspections and then be relieved of sanctions. And if he passed inspections, maybe the Russians or the French would come in and support him and get sanctions relief. He could only pass inspections if he didn't have anything there to get caught with. But at the same time, to admit that he was disarming before the world would have been humiliating. He would have none of that. He sought glory and dignity in the Arab world as a as a Fidel Castro defiant sort of leader. And he also feared that it would make him vulnerable, that if Iran or Israel saw that he had no deterrence, that they would attack him.
