The Liar Who Told the Truth

REMEMBER THE STORY of the boy who cried wolf? Well, narcissistic and mass-murdering dictators don’t as a rule cry wolf but they lie all the same, and most of the time. Although there are personality traits shared by tyrants, each is in the end his own monster. Predictable in the long term perhaps but not quite in the short. There were many reasons America couldn’t understand a personality like Saddam Hussein’s while he remained a prisoner of perceptions he wouldn’t outgrow.

Confirmation bias. The US believed Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) because he had used chemical weapons before and had been caught pursuing an ille­gal nuclear weapons programme. Saddam believed America— that is, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—was all-seeing and therefore knew very well that he had no WMDs. Indeed, a “C.I.A. capable of making a gigantic mistake on the scale of its error about Iraqi WMD was not part of Saddam’s worldview.”

Two decades after the publication of Ghost Wars (2004), a history of the CIA’s involvement in the Afghan wars, Steve Coll, currently an editor at the Economist, has brought out a parallel volume on the other post-9/11 war. But it’s taken years of research and hundreds of interviews and, most dramatically, a lawsuit against the Pentagon to access at least half of the 2,000-odd hours of audio recordings of Saddam’s high-level meetings which the Iraqi president “recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon”. Much of this last source has never seen the light of day before this book.

The Achilles Trap begins long before the Gulf War of 1991, going back to Saddam’s earliest days as a trained Ba’athist assassin. As a result, the book’s biggest attraction is its portrait of the Iraqi dictator, “half joking, capable of striking prescience, reliably fixated on American and Israeli power and, above all, impossible to reduce to a simple explanation.” Unsurprisingly, a “recurring theme is the trouble American decision-makers had in assessing Saddam’s resentments and managing his inconsist­encies.” America’s engagement with Saddam began in the early 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War when the CIA convinced Baghdad to accept its help in the form of satellite images of Iranian troop positions as the Reagan administration was concerned about Saddam losing the war and Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Tehran consequently expanding its influence in the Middle East.

It went well till the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Washington, in collaboration with Israel, secretly shipped arms to Khomeini for a while, blew up in everyone’s face and appeared to confirm Saddam’s misgivings about America’s trustworthiness. Writing in the New York Times in February, Coll remarked, “That Iran-contra represented a strain of harebrained incompetence in American foreign policy did not occur to him [Saddam].” And yet, the collaboration survived the crisis, showing a pragmatism Saddam was quite capable of, although the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) edged the CIA out. Paradoxically, as Coll writes in the book, the “fact that he had suspected all along that the Americans were double-deal­ing liars actually made it easier for him to reconnect—he had been proved right.” Confirmation bias again. (“Your relation­ships with the third world are like an Iraqi peasant’s relation­ship with his new wife. Three days of tea and honey, and then off to the fields for life,” Saddam had told a US diplomat.)

The point of no return was Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. George HW Bush, still intent on salvaging a work­ing relationship and misled by Arab allies that Saddam wouldn’t invade Kuwait, failed to clarify the cost of Baghdad’s misadven­ture. As Saddam would ask his American interrogators years later, “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?” For his part, he hadn’t understood how isolated he had become in the Arab world. Bush would be taken to task by Republicans for not finishing the job by removing Saddam but the war and the sanctions that followed decimated Iraq’s socio-economy.

By the time the Clinton administration took office, containment was de facto policy. Yet Clinton didn’t altogether abandon the idea of deposing Saddam. The regime-toppling covert programme had the cryptonym DB ACHILLES. “For both the Iraqi dictator and the C.I.A., the example of the Homeric hero with a vulnerable heel offered a call to action, despite the long odds… Saddam regarded America as too hubristic and too afraid of taking casualties to de­feat a united Arab nation… The [CIA] embraced hope over experience as they searched for a coup plan that might work. Both sides therefore trapped themselves by imagining a fatal flaw in their opponent that did not actually exist,” explains Coll. Clinton allowed the CIA to set up shop in Kurdistan and get conned by Ahmed Chalabi—the charlatan whose sources’ false claims would be sold as facts by the George W Bush administration later—to catastrophic effect.

On the whole, the “Clinton administration believed that its enforcement of no-fly zones and its occasional missile strikes kept Saddam penned up. These did constrain him, but the more recently available records show that the Iraqi leader inter­preted Clinton’s episodic and limited attacks as signs of American weakness,” writes Coll. More damagingly, “Saddam was left alone to discern America’s intentions [later, when invasion was imminent] because the Clinton administration refused to talk to him about anything significant.” There were domestic political constraints behind such half-hearted ad-hocness too. In 1998, Clinton had privately told British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “If I weren’t constrained by the press, I would pick up the phone and call the son of a bitch.”

The American side of the story—especially the misconcep­tions, missteps and outright lies in the run-up to the 2003 inva­sion—has been told before, though it hadn’t been tied together so well. Nevertheless, it’s the Iraqi tale that’s Coll’s USP here. For that, a less incomplete picture of what Saddam thought and why he behaved as he did was imperative. What we get, above all, is the irony at the heart of the matter.

As the UN inspectors, led by Swedish rivals Rolf Ekéus and Hans Blix, poured into Iraq in 1991, Saddam had the clandes­tine nuclear weapons programme terminated and his chemical and biological weapons—the same used against Iranian troops, in the Anfal genocide against Kurds, and in repressing the Shia minority—destroyed. Astonishingly, this was carried out in secret, with consequences: “The decision to 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.” It meant that “even when Iraq later sought to be honest about what had been destroyed in the summer of 1991, its officials would struggle to persuade U.N. inspectors.”

Saddam didn’t tell his own generals what he had done for fear of external attacks. His re­gime lied to the UN inspectors be­cause he couldn’t afford to be hu­miliated. To make matters worse, his secret police misled UN inspectors whenever they turned up at a sensitive site, giving the impression they had something to hide. The story was the same when the inspectors, this time led by Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, returned in late-2002. What were they hiding? According to Coll, a paranoid and insulated regime like Saddam’s saw all foreigners, including UN inspectors, as spies and potential assassins. They were guarding not only the layouts of premises or hustling someone away but also pulling a veil over their modus operandi. In late-2002, although Blix still found it hard to believe Iraq had no secret weapons left, he had begun to wonder if “absence of evidence” was indeed “evidence of absence”. The UN Special Commission had ended up disarming Iraq coercively in the 1990s, but it was unaware of its own achievement.

The numerous character portraits—including the father of Iraq’s atomic bomb project Jafar Dhia Jafar (one of Coll’s important interviewees), the eloquent Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s son-in-law and one-time heir Hussein Kamel al-Majid who was executed for treason in 1996, Ali Hassan al-Majid aka Chemical Ali, the wise and amiable Nizar Hamdoon—make the book a little diffuse but enrich it with a more complete narrative. According to Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti (executed in 2007), his strategic mistake was the failure to understand that Israel had become a part of life in the Middle East. Crudely racist, believing the worst anti-Semitic myths, such intransigence, along with his refusal to publicly express sympathy after 9/11 while teasing Washington about al-Qaeda with whom he had nothing to do, only entrenched the Bush administration’s delusions.

“Narcissism is dangerous and can cost a man the opportu­nity to be wise,” Saddam had said of George W Bush. He could have been talking about himself. Few in Washington knew that he had lost much of his fire and was immersed in writing novels—abysmal by all accounts—in the fall of 2002. The CIA was not omniscient; not in a place where it had no assets. Liar and cheat, Saddam Hussein had nothing to come clean about on the eve of war. But almost nobody believed him.

AmericabooksCIAIraq WarSaddam HusseinWMD