When We Misread Dictators... Steve Coll on Saddam Hussein and the American Invasion of Iraq

As a writer I had the space to try to humanize him without sanitizing him. That was my mission: to try to see the world from behind his eyes in order to explain his otherwise inexplicable behavior.

Steve Coll

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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Steve Coll is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has served as President and CEO of New America and the Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent book is The Achilles’ Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• Saddam Hussein - 2:56
• Iran-Iraq War - 10:22
• WMD - 27:06
• 2003 American Invasion - 46:03

Key Links

The Achilles’ Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll

“How Iraq was Lost” by Robert Kaplan in The New Statesman (Book Review of The Achilles' Trap)

Read more from Steve Coll at The New Yorker

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Robert Kaplan on the Politics of the Past and Future of the Greater Middle East

Steven Simon on American Foreign Policy in the Middle East including Iran and the Wars in Iraq

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Apes of the State created all Music

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Transcript

I never thought Saddam Hussein could surprise me. But it turns out Saddam wrote four novels. Near the end of his life, he even began to identify more as a man of letters rather than the ruthless dictator most of us know about. It turns out there is a lot we don’t know about even the most infamous of characters.

I learned quite a bit about Saddam and America’s foreign policy in  Steve Coll’s new book, The Achilles’ Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. Steve is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has served as President and CEO of New America and the Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Our conversation touches on Saddam and his brutal regime, but also the decisions American presidential administrations made that led to two wars in Iraq. But this conversation really challenges how we think about dictators and dictatorships. It does not excuse Saddam, but it does get away from some of the more common tropes to better understand what this difficult period of history means for how we think about dictatorship and democracy.

Now a few weeks ago I had a conversation with Kurt Weyland about democratic resilience. One of the show’s listeners, Jeff Hallock, had some strong feelings and wrote an impressive response. It’s posted on the website as Engaged Democracy: A Proactive Defense. Please check it out and if you want to write a response to an episode, please email it to me at jkempf@democracyparadox.com.  I’m also happy to promote your response if you post it on another website or blog. Just send me a note.

The podcast is sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website.

But for now… This is my conversation with Steve Coll…

jmk

Steve Coll, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Steve Coll

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

jmk

Well, Steve, I found your book really interesting. It's called The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, CIA, and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq. I wasn't quite sure how this book might fit into the present day when I read it because it's about something that happened a long time ago now. But as I was reading it, I felt that there were a lot of themes that I think are very relevant to the present day.

One of those is how I think about dictators. I typically think of them as unqualified and without merit, I mean, almost cartoonish. Part of that is the characterization that I have in my mind of Saddam Hussein. He's almost the archetype of the dictator who somehow rose to power and really had no qualifications or reason to be there. But as I read your book, I found that my assumptions about him were very misplaced. Can you start out by just telling us a little bit about who Saddam Hussein was and maybe just a little bit about what he was actually like?

Steve Coll

Yeah, the short version is that he grew up in Iraq at a time of political tumult - coups, counter coups, assassinations. He came from a very hard place, outside of Baghdad, and grew up with a gun in his hand. He made his way to Baghdad, entered political life essentially as an assassin or as a gunman on the periphery of other people's coup plots. Gradually, he proved to be savvier than his elders, and after a period in exile, he came back to Iraq and rode a tank into the Republican palace and joined comrades in declaring a revolution that ended up lasting until the American invasion in 2003. He positioned himself first as vice president and then soon after he took absolute power.

Now, he ruled through terror. As we all came to understand in America, he killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, gassed many thousands of Kurds to put down a rebellion against his rule, and started an unnecessary war with Iran that claimed a million lives. So, he has a terrible record and it's easy to understand why analysts and leaders in the West just dismissed him as a cartoonish dictator with blood on his hands, because he was a tyrant. But he ruled not only through terror. He had charisma. He had a vision of a modernizing Iraq that at least initially was pretty mainstream: rapid industrialization and emphasis on education; literacy; healthcare; national infrastructure; national pride.

He had a lot of energy. He managed to hold relationships with his close comrades, some of them for many decades, through humor and gifts and other kinds of techniques. None of these are completely unusual in the land of dictators, but I would summarize that during the pandemic, when I was working on the book, I rewatched The Sopranos. And I would say to my wife at some point, ‘Oh, this is Tony Soprano. Now it all makes sense to me.’ The parallels are really pretty strong.

jmk

What really came out to me was that the image of him as a tyrant and somebody who murdered his people and was aggressive in terms of foreign policy in terms of creating unnecessary wars and putting this country in a bad position because of them… I mean, that was all true. The part that was surprising to me was the fact that he wasn't necessarily incompetent. He was somebody who, like you said, was very energetic. He was constantly working on things. It just wasn't an image of Saddam Hussein that I typically have in my head. I would have thought of him as very lazy, as somebody who just expected other people to do things for him.

But as I read your book, it made sense that somebody who was that energetic and that motivated and that driven would get to that position. The tragedy of it all was not that he was incompetent, but the fact that he didn't have his heart in the right place. That he didn't have his morals in the right place in terms of how he treated his own people and others.

Steve Coll

I think that's right. He was ambitious. That's where a lot of his energy came from. He really wanted glory in the Arab world in particular. It's always hard to guess where somebody's ambition came from. He did not seem like a psychologically broken or troubled man like a lot of the cheap armchair psychoanalysis of him said when we were trying to figure him out. It said he must have been beaten by his father or he must have had a terrible kind of psychosis inducing childhood. In fact, when you listen to him on these tapes or read the transcripts or read his correspondence, he's comfortable in his own skin. It's scary that he's comfortable in his own skin considering how many people he kills.

But he's relaxed. He's stable. He builds stable relationships around him. He has a temper. Yes, but a lot of people do and it's not off the charts. There were myths that he would walk out of meetings and summon a cabinet official who had offended him and then there would be a gunshot and he would come back in and say let's continue the meeting. That didn't happen. He didn't have to do that. He would just nod at someone and then that person would disappear from the face of the earth without his hands on it.

But it's a puzzle, because as a writer I had the space to try to humanize him without sanitizing him. That was my mission: to try to see the world from behind his eyes in order to explain his otherwise inexplicable behavior. I think writers have the luxury of doing that. You sort of have permission. Also I had time and materials that weren't available when American presidents were trying to figure him out. But I started to think it's easy for me to do this, but our national leadership in domestic democratic politics, with all the competition that's baked in between parties and opposition and government, finds it hard to get away with empathizing with a dictator. There's no reward.

There's no domestic political reward for thinking reflectively about Kim Jong Un or even Vladimir Putin. Even when the stakes are very high, all of the incentives in the system are to demonize, to take the easy political points and move on. Because these people are appalling, nobody's going to say that you have terrible judgment for simply demonizing someone like that and moving on. But it deprives you of critical information that you need to prevent security crises. This is what the Saddam Hussein case tells you. So, you've got to figure out a better way if you're in charge of the country's security. That’s what I came to think.

jmk

So, let's dive into some of the policy choices that he made, particularly foreign policy. One of the earliest and most devastating mistakes that he made was to go to war with Iran. Why did he make that choice? Why did he decide to attack Iran? And I want to kind of preface this by saying that he wasn't just ambitious and driven. You also note the fact that he was incredibly well read. He was somebody who studied different ideas and tried to understand things. This isn't somebody who doesn't try to think through the policy consequences and doesn't try to find people to help him make these decisions. And yet he still made terrible decisions, particularly in terms of foreign policy. Why does he go to war with Iran in the first place?

Steve Coll

You're right. He's well read. He's an autodidact. He's completely self-invented. He did this all on his own and self-made folks are incredibly admirable. Like, wow, what drove you to do that? At the same time, he's not well rounded. He doesn't have a seminar going on with peers challenging his thoughts, because nobody will interrupt him no matter what he's saying. So, he's knowledgeable, but he can also be disoriented because he's so isolated from the information that he's absorbing in some ways, if that makes any sense. Anyway, why did he invade Iran?

I mean, he grew up as a master and this is as great - like Tony Soprano - he is great at dealing with enemies. He can spot an enemy from a mile away. He can spot an enemy sitting in the chair next to him. He has a very deeply thought through philosophy about how to deal with enemies. When Ayatollah Khomeini took charge of Iran after the 1979 revolution, Saddam identified him as a threat, a mortal threat, because he was the leader of an expansionist Shia Islamic revolution. He had been living in exile in Saddam's Iraq, but Saddam had kicked him out. He believed that Saddam was an apostate, not without reason, by his own lights, because Saddam was not, at that time, a practicing religious man.

He had some respect for the cultural traditions of Islam in Iraq, but that wasn't his shtick. He grew up in a secular revolutionary, socialist, Pan-Arab environment and that was the philosophy that he had imbibed. That's how he lived. So, Ayatollah Khomeini kept saying, ‘I'm going to go to Baghdad and hang this guy from the nearest light post.’ That was part of his rhetoric when he was leading Iran. So, Saddam basically decided to invade because he thought he could knock Ayatollah Khomeini off before Khomeini came after him. That's the simplest way to think of it. The reason he miscalculated was twofold. I think, one, he believed that Khomeini was weaker than he was because there was so much turmoil in Tehran at that time around 1980 - a lot of factionalism, a lot of unsettled politics, and even violence.

So, he thought, ‘Okay, I'm going to take advantage of this instability before he consolidates rule. I'm going to go in there and make myself felt. Then he started the war in an area of Iran that has a large Arabic speaking population. He thought somehow this was friendly territory and that was a miscalculation. So, he went into an area that was as strongly nationalistic and in opposition to Iraq as Farsi speaking, more traditionally Persian areas that he might have otherwise invaded.

Then the last factor was he lost conviction and he was a bad general. He went in, he stopped, and then he sort of thought, ‘Well, actually I don't want to try to fight this war all the way to Tehran.’ He lost a lot of his air force early on. He was believing that he could get out of the war fairly quickly, maybe teach Ayatollah Khomeini a lesson and withdraw to the previous borders. He miscalculated about how Khomeini would react and so the war ended up dragging on for eight bloody years.

jmk

Sounds like a lot of parallels to Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Steve Coll

Yeah. That's a very good point. Very similar, except I suppose Putin rationalized the invasion through this historical myth making about Ukraine belonging to Russia. But yeah, in terms of the military, the political military miscalculations, there's definitely some parallels.

jmk

So, you mentioned a little bit about Saddam's worldview and his ideology in terms of Arab socialism. It's a set of ideas that are a little bit foreign to people these days, because we think of the Arab world tied so much more to the Islamic religion. We think of that as the driving force of all of its politics. That hasn't necessarily been the case throughout most of modern history. Can you tell us just a little bit about the ideology and the political ideas behind Saddam's political movement, his political party, and what exactly they stood for?

Steve Coll

So, the context is the end of colonialism in the Arab world and the rise of nationalism as a response to colonialism all across the Arab world. In Iraq, there was a British installed royal family in power through the Second World War and into the 1950s. Then a series of secular left nationalist anti-colonial parties arose in opposition to the royal family and started competing with one another. As you would find in lots of other places in the emerging world at that time, the military was important because they had the tanks and the planes to actually move against the government.

So, some of these Arab nationalists, secular socialist, different variations on that theme were wearing uniforms and were leading these coup attempts. Others were intellectuals in universities or like Saddam basically peasants who came to the city, got swept up in cafe society, picked up a couple of guns and decided that they would join the revolution. The main fault line… and this is really fascinating. I didn't understand this well until I started digging into this even with as much time as I've spent reporting on the Middle East. The real fault line when Saddam came of political age in the 1960s was between the communist party in Iraq and the socialist, nationalist, pan-Arabs that he belonged to. They hated each other more than they hated the British royal family in some ways.

Of course, you can imagine this became a proxy fight of the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and I think Saddam's first encounters with the CIA were during the Kennedy administration when Kennedy was playing around with Arab nationalists like Saddam's group called the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party as a third way alternative to hard core Soviet back communists. There was a big debate in Eisenhower and Kennedy's Washington. Are people like Saddam good enough to fight communism with or are they proto-communists themselves? If we back them, will they then just go to Moscow or what?

In the end, at critical times in the 1960s, we don't have all the records because the CIA hasn't declassified them, which suggests to me that it must be a really bad story after all this time that they still haven't declassified it, but they were clearly sympathetic to Saddam's Baathists against the communists and certainly assisted the first coup that brought them to power which was accompanied by a slaughter of communists in the streets of Baghdad, which is maybe one of the reasons why the files haven't been released. In any event, there was a particular philosophy of pan-Arab nationalism that Saddam encountered during a period of exile in Cairo when Nasser was setting the Arab world on fire, the Egyptian pan-Arab nationalist.

His rhetorical style, his anti-colonialism, his charismatic call to the Arab peoples to throw off the artificial borders of the colonialists and unite as a force in a new world really was ringing in Saddam's ears when he eventually came to power. But his particular route deviated from Nasserism around matters of economics and philosophy. When you read the text, they're quite arid and it's a little bit hard to tell whether this is really a blueprint for national development or just a bunch of philosophers drinking too much caffeine and trading sort of slogans and rhetoric.

But what we can see from Saddam's actions is that the way he interpreted this intellectual inheritance was a national state led industrial policy like Nehru in India, sort of taking some ideas from the Soviet rapid industrialization, some ideas from the West, and seeking the very best of the world's technology. So, wanting to have both superpowers involved in Iraq's national development, but also to hold them at arm's length. That was where he ended up.

jmk

So, the United States preferred the Arab nationalists to the communists from a pretty early date it sounds like. When we get to the Iran-Iraq war, that's 20 some odd years after the Kennedy administration. How does the United States see its role in that war? I mean, to what extent does the United States really take a side and support Iraq or to what extent does it look at both sides as bad guys in that war?

Steve Coll

Yeah, that's basically the question that governed the Reagan administration's debates about policy in that part of the Middle East from the time the war started in September 1980, until it ended in 1988. Essentially, they went from a declared policy of ‘we're neutral. We're not going to send arms to either side. We would like this war to end. It's bad for our friends, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the smaller, weaker Persian Gulf neighbors of those two giants who were warring with one another. It's bad for shipping of oil. So we just think it ought to settle down.’

Now, in private, what you can see in the Reagan administration's discourse, and occasionally it would burst into public with comments such as the infamous one by Henry Kissinger, who said something to the effect of it's just a shame that they both can't lose, which was a sort of cynicism that if they are going to fight a war, a stalemate is probably in our interest. Let them weaken one another because Iran is obviously hostile to the United States - directly taking hostages, seizing the embassy - and Iraq in its ardent, under Saddam, rejectionism of Israel and its alliance with the radical, as seen in Washington, Arab states that rejected any accommodation with Israel and were supporting the more violent factions of the Palestinian liberation movement.

So that neutrality had a cynical bent. However, in 1982, Iran broke through Iraqi lines around Basra, the second city in the south and it looked for a frightening couple of months in Washington as if the Iranians would drive all the way to Baghdad, overthrow Saddam, extend Iranian revolutionary influence to the entire state of Iraq, capture its oil revenues and basically double its potential as a disrupted force in the Middle East. So, the Reagan administration said we can no longer afford neutrality. We got to tilt to Iraq. And fairly early on in the book, there's an episode where the Reagan administration secretly dispatches a CIA officer to Baghdad carrying satellite photography to help Saddam see the problem that he's got with the Iranian forces potentially breaking through.

That starts a covert effort to help Saddam avoid losing the war. The effort is primarily satellite intelligence. You mentioned the parallel to Putin and Ukraine and that's what we did for Ukraine, too. We didn't put any boots on the ground. We sent them a lot of military equipment, but we also sent them a lot of satellite intelligence about exactly where the Russians were and what they were thinking about doing next to try to get the Ukrainians an advantage given their smaller population size and smaller industrial base. Same thing with Iraq. They were trying to use America's distinctive, at that time, almost unique eye in the sky to help Saddam see where the Iranians were and to prevent them from breaking through.

That tilt, which was never really acknowledged in public during the eighties became the core of US foreign policy for most of that time. I mean, there was an exception, the Iran Contra scandal, where we were playing both sides again and that just fueled Saddam's suspicions that we couldn't be trusted because he never really believed. You almost get this picture that every time he holds one of these satellite photographs of Iranian military positions, what he's thinking to himself is, ‘Is this really a valid photograph or has this been doctored to fool me into going down that mountain pass where there's an ambush waiting for me?’ He was constantly interpreting things in the most suspicious light.

jmk

So, after that war, how is the United States administration really thinking about Iraq? Are they thinking of them more as a partner at this point based on our collaboration during that war where we were providing them military intelligence or are we really putting them at arm's length going forward?

Steve Coll

The basic position was, especially after the war ended… It ended, in a stalemate because of the assistance we provided Iraq and Iran's own troubles in mounting a military campaign led Ayatollah Khomeini against his better preferences to accept that he wasn't going to win this war and that it was too costly. He settled essentially for the same borders that had existed before the war started. So, the war ends which was an objective at that point of the United States. The Iranian revolution is still the major problem that the United States sees in the region. It's a threat to international shipping in the Gulf. It's a threat to the United States. It's a threat to American allies in the Gulf, oil producing states, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, et cetera. So, Saddam looks like a check on Iranian power.

Even after the war, he looks like a secular rather than a religious fundamentalist leader. He looks like a man who's going to have to rebuild the country after the shattering experience of being bombed and invaded during the war with Iran. So, he's going to need Western companies to come in and he's inviting Western businesses in. He doesn't want to be dependent on the Soviet Union exclusively. He wants the best technology. He's very close to the French which was a relationship that the Americans sort of encouraged during the war with Iraq because it allowed Western arms to flow into Iraq without the US taking responsibility for it, since the French were willing to do that.

So, basically the policy of the Bush administration is written down. It's reaffirmed in the fall of 1988 that this is a guy who we can do business with. So, let’s see if we can strengthen the relationship through commercial ties. That'll be good for American businesses, be good for American agriculture, and let's maintain contact with him and keep trying to reel him in, try to make him more like our friends in Jordan or our friends in Egypt or our friends in Riyadh. They may not always share our attitudes about the state of Israel, but they're moderate in the language of the day. Can we bring Iraq into that camp? That would be a big achievement. That was the policy and it lasted, I guess, about a year and a half until he invaded Kuwait and turned the world upside down.

jmk

But during this time of cooperation with Iraq and the cooperation that we provided him during the war with Iran, he's actively pursuing a nuclear weapon and other weapons of mass destruction. Some listeners may get confused because of all of the talk about WMD and weapons of mass destruction after the second war in Iraq. I mean, we found out there was no weapons of mass destruction. But the reason why we thought there might be was because there really were efforts to develop a nuclear weapon and other weapons of mass destruction before the original Iraq war. So why was Iraq even pursuing a nuclear weapon? That seems like a red line that could create all kinds of diplomatic problems if it was discovered.

Steve Coll

It's a great question. He wanted one for deterrence against Israel. He wanted one for prestige. I think those were the two motivations. He was aware that it was a red line, so he was arguably more cautious about getting caught building a nuclear weapon than he was when he started to build chemical weapons, which he used quite openly. He denied that he was doing it, but everybody in the world could see it. But he wanted a nuclear weapon because he was convinced that on the basis of experience, Israel would not hesitate to strike him preemptively and he believed that it was quite plausible that Israel would one day just nuke him. So, he wanted deterrence.

He also had a philosophy that he articulated in public openly during this time which was the Arab world deserves its own nuclear deterrent, if we're going to be in a standoff with Israel. He cited the US-Soviet mutually assured destruction regime. He said, The purpose of having a nuclear deterrent is not to fight a nuclear war. It's to prevent a nuclear war. But it's got to be balanced and they have one. We deserve one. And by the way, we are the leaders of the Arab world. Forget about all these other countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia. They're nothing. It's all about Iraq. We'll take care of the Arab world. We'll have a nuclear weapon.’

In fact, at one point he said, ‘If the West wants peace in the Middle East, they should give us a nuclear weapon so that we can offset Israel and then everything will be stable.’ That was his argument. So, sometimes he could sound like he really didn't understand how the world worked, even when he could, in the next paragraph, be shrewd. But anyway, he did have this secret nuclear weapon program. I think it's worth noting that the Americans didn't know anything about it through the eighties. It was secret and he successfully kept it secret until after the Kuwait war.

On chemical weapons, it's probably just worth noting that he acquired those for more tactical reasons. I think he concluded that he needed chemical weapons to hold off Iran because Iran had these martyrdom seeking waves of volunteers who were charging into Iraqi lines and they seemed unstoppable because they had no fear. When he started deploying mustard gas and sarin to defeat them, he discovered that worked. So, his generals advised him that they really needed this. Then he started using chemical weapons against his own rebellious Kurdish population, which was also effective, even as it attracted international horror and criticism.

It made things uncomfortable for the George H. W. Bush administration, because you now look back at the declassified records of their meetings with Saddam and they basically are saying, ‘You're making things very difficult for us. Every time you gas people in public, the world sees it and we have trouble defending you. We have a Congress. They have their own opinions. They're not going to release these credits and so forth.’ But he really believed that it was necessary. He had the same attitude about Israel, which was, ‘They have it. Why can't we have it?’

jmk

That approach to chemical weapons really drove some real fear in some scientists about his development of nuclear weapons because I remember reading that one of the scientists refused to work on the project because he was concerned that if they developed a nuclear weapon that they wouldn't just use it against a country like Israel, but they might actually use it against their own people. There was a real sense that Saddam really was that malicious and that tyrannical against his own people.

Steve Coll

That's right. In trying to tell the story of the nuclear weapons program, I spent time chronicling the experiences of two of their very best physicists. They're kind of Robert Oppenheimer figure, a guy named Jafar Dhia Jafar, who was a physicist educated in Britain and who ended up being the real father of the nuclear weapons program and then his friend, a physicist trained in Canada named Hussain Al-Shahristani, who also came back to Iraq to work on the nuclear program as Saddam decided to secretly build a bomb. They were both arrested under suspicion of not being sufficiently loyal to Saddam. But during their periods of detention, one of them, Jafar, managed to avoid torture and decided to go back and build the bomb.

The other, Shahristani, as you recall, was lying on the floor, his back practically broken from the torture he'd endured under interrogation and Saddam's half-brother is running the secret police and comes to talk to him and says, ‘I'm sorry they've been rough on you, but we really need you. You're a great physicist. This is a big national program. If you'll only come back to the office, we'll make it all right. If you want a bank account in Switzerland, we can work with you there and so forth.’ But he looks up from the floor and says, ‘I'm just not going to do that.’

He says later, I think quite credibly, given what he endured that he was thinking to himself, ‘If I help Saddam build a nuclear weapon, he's going to use it. He's going to be the first power to use it and he'll probably use it on his own people.’ So, Hussain Shahristani was incredibly devout and spiritual and I don't know what voice was speaking to him, but he said, ‘I'm not going to compromise on this point.’ He ended up spending years and years in the worst solitary confinement a human could endure in Abu Ghraib before he escaped into exile.

jmk

How close did Iraq get to building a nuclear weapon?

Steve Coll

It's a question that was debated after the program was discovered. Nobody thought they were two or three months away. They might have been able to build a single crude weapon within a year or two after they were busted. Some people think it was longer than that. The scientists who were involved, who I interviewed, tended to say it would take longer. But then the inspectors, who were the objective technocrats and experts who came in and saw all of the details of where they were when they got busted, tended toward one to two years. They were pretty close. Much closer than anybody wanted them to be basically.

jmk

So, when I've talked to other people about Iraq, the First Gulf War is still very much portrayed as a, quote unquote, ‘good war.’ That it was one where we went in with a clear objective. We got our troops out. It was a war that was provoked by Saddam Hussein rather than something that was more of a war of choice like the second Iraq war.

I got a very different impression in reading your book. I got a sense that mistakes that the United States made created the environment that allowed for Iraq to make the decision to invade Kuwait. Then even after the war, it felt we hadn't fully thought through what exactly our relationship with Iraq, the world's relationship with Iraq, was going to be. So, in your view, just point blank, do you still think of the First Gulf War as a good war or do you think of it as very problematic?

Steve Coll

I mean, it's messier than the heroic ticker tape parade narrative of the time that those of us who were adults when it occurred can recall. I wanted to go back with just an umpire's state of mind - call the balls and strikes as you see them -and really go back over the missed opportunity to prevent Saddam from invading Kuwait in the first place. Because I think if you're going to do the counterfactual history, the neglected subject is why didn't we send a stronger deterrence message to him? That's even the question that he asked after he was in American captivity, following the 2003 invasion. He was like, ‘If you didn't want me to invade, why didn't you tell me?’

At the time there was one meeting with a woman named April Glaspie and Saddam about two weeks before he invaded that became the explanation for why Bush administration had failed to deter him. Basically, the guys in Washington threw this female ambassador - like the pioneering female ambassador of her generation, an Arabist, really fluent and experienced. You read her cables assessing Saddam and they're definitely the best takes on him that are in writing in the files available. So, she knew what she was doing and she wasn't the reason that he thought that. This was a mischaracterization of that meeting in my judgment going back over it kind of stone by stone.

The real thing was that the president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, who was a pretty successful foreign policy president - very active, very serious, experienced, well qualified, on the phone all the time with allies trying to take information from others, a listener. You look at what he's doing and he seems like he knows what he's doing. He got bad advice from a lot of Arab allies that he trusted. They were kind of the people who he thought knew Saddam better than he did and they were telling him, he's not going to invade, he's not going to invade.

So, he failed to do what in hindsight would have worked, which was to tell Saddam, ‘You're making a lot of noise about invading. If you do it, you're going to pay an enormous price. Trust me. You are going to pay. We are going to throw you out of Kuwait no matter what it takes. Don't do it.’ If he had believed that, I think based on his conduct and other circumstances, he probably wouldn't have invaded and the world would have been spared a whole series of disastrous events that led up to the 2003 invasion. That's why I was interested in it. Then I think the other point you make is also correct. The failure to prevent the war is a bigger deal than the standard history gives it. That's my first take.

The second is that the failure to plan for the aftermath of a successful war to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait proved to be incredibly costly and morally uncomfortable enough that President Bush basically called on the Iraqi people to get rid of Saddam to save him the trouble of going to Baghdad and overthrowing him. The Iraqi people did that and nobody came to help them and they were crushed, absolutely crushed. Yes, they had their own reasons for rising up against their dictator, but it's a pretty good lesson that maybe American presidents shouldn't call on people to do things that they're not prepared to support.

jmk

One of the other problems is in the aftermath we left Iraq in a state of limbo. You described Bill Clinton as not really having a good sense of what to do next with Iraq. There wasn't a good sense of how do we end the sanctions? How do we bring Iraq back into the global community with Saddam still there? It didn't feel like there was any pathway to get to the next chapter in Iraq. They were just going to be a semi-occupied country indefinitely until we could get rid of Saddam Hussein. I mean, it seemed to be the policy.

Steve Coll

Yeah, that was the policy and it got tighter and tighter even over the course of the Clinton administration. Initially, there was some ambiguity that did kind of confuse Saddam. You can see from the tapes, he's not quite sure what to make of Clinton, because at first, he's thinking maybe if I actually disarm, because he had disarmed. If we're going to pull that thread of why did we think that he had WMD, well, he had WMD. He used it. It was in plain sight. Then after he was expelled from Kuwait, the inspectors discovered that he had this nuclear weapons program. Everybody's freaking out. Oh my God. How did we miss that? Then he also had a biological weapons program that people knew not very much about.

What happened was in the summer of 1991, after he lost the war in Kuwait, he unilaterally and secretly destroyed all of his chemical and biological weapons and then he lied about what he had done. Very confusing. Why comply with international disarmament demands and then not take credit for it, but instead lie to the inspectors who come to prove that you've done what you've actually done? The logic for the West was, it's impossible to parse. But if you turn around and see it from his point of view, there are several factors. One of which is related to this point you make about Clinton.

He didn't believe that he would actually get credit for disarming, even if the West judged that he had done so. He thought it was all a game. That they were never going to accept him and that they were just using disarmament to pressure him and he wasn't all wrong about that. Secondly, he feared losing prestige and inviting attacks. He felt like if he allowed a bunch of Western inspectors in white lab coats to stand around in Iraq with clipboards, taking note as every one of his powerful missiles was dismantled and destroyed, and all of his chemical weapons were destroyed, certifying that he was now without such weapons, that the Iranians or the Israelis or other people who he imagined spent 24 hours a day, figuring out how to get rid of him, would take advantage of his weakness.

Even apart from his vulnerability to attack, there was this self-image that he had built up - this colossal self-aggrandizement. That he saw himself as the rightful leader of the Arab world. That was his legacy. That was his identity and it would be humiliating to admit that he had done all of this. Rather, he found strength in fighting the system and making life tough for the inspectors and defying the West at every opportunity for a few years. He couldn't quite decide which way he wanted to play it.

But eventually toward the end of the Clinton administration, when Madeline Albright, President Clinton's Secretary of State, gave a speech that basically said, it doesn't matter if he disarms, we're not going to relieve Iraq of these crippling sanctions unless he leaves power. Once he heard that he's like, ‘Okay, well, I can have sanctions with inspections that are a big pain and humiliating or I can have sanctions without inspection. So why don't I just throw everybody out?’ So, he did and it blinded the West to any day-to-day access to the sites where they believed he might be hiding stuff. That only exacerbated the misunderstanding that he might have reconstituted his weapons programs or that he might be hiding substantial amounts of stuff.

jmk

It’s still hard to understand in this day and age. I mean, we live very much in what they call the information age. It's just hard to fathom that there weren't credible sources of intelligence about Iraq first trying to build the nuclear weapon and then later on with weapons inspectors actually inspecting that they no longer had one and that they had gotten rid of these weapons. It's difficult to fully just wrap my head around the fact that we couldn't actually put together some forms of intelligence to understand and have a better sense what was actually happening within the country.

Steve. Coll

Yeah, it was a closed system. It was hard to get into his inner circle. Even if you had gotten into his inner circle, he often lied to his own generals because he wanted to keep them off balance. I think on the human side we don't know exactly who were the best sources the CIA had. But the impression you get from talking to people involved and looking at the records and so forth is the Americans could probably talk to generals. There were probably generals who were trying to play both sides thinking if the Americans are going to invade, maybe I can be the next defense minister.

The problem was that the generals, as it turns out, didn't know the truth either. They thought that he had stuff. They sort of figured, why would he have destroyed it and lied about it? They had the same problem we had. So, to keep them off balance or to keep their morale up, he would say at a meeting, ‘Just fight them for 10 days. Then I'll take care of everything. I have a secret weapon.’ Well, maybe he's got a nuclear bomb stored away someplace that we don't know about.

So, even if you're a spy and you managed to recruit a three-star general who's pretty close to the leadership and sometimes goes to meetings where Saddam is there, you're asking him, ‘What's the truth about WMD?’ And he tells you, ‘I think he's got a nuclear weapon.’ Well, you report that and you think that's a credible source. Well, it turns out not even people who are close to a dictator like that necessarily know the truth.

I was thinking when you referred to the information age of something I hadn't thought of before, which is would this have played out the same way in the digital age, because one of the things that's interesting about Saddam is he kind of the last analog dictator. I mean, he was really analog. He didn't use the phone because he knew how that could make him vulnerable to targeting. But because Iraq was basically frozen in time in 1988 by the sanctions that followed the Kuwait War, they never really had a web, even a proto-web or any kind of digital telecom. The Americans would fly over them and use satellite photography to try to document changes at their suspected weapons sites.

But this world we're in now of open-source intelligence collection or big data leaks or people who can come out and change the way we understand closed systems hadn't happened yet. So, if you had a situation like this in the digital age with amateur sleuths and other open-source people, would it change our understanding enough to change the politics when the president says we have to invade? I don't know. It's worth thinking about.

jmk

So, over time, we decide that Iraq must be developing WMD. That they're doing it covertly. That the methods of intelligence that we have all point to the fact that he's probably developing a nuclear weapon again. So, we decide to invade and on one level, this all makes sense. If you really do think that Iraq is going to have a nuclear bomb, maybe it would make sense to invade their country to stop them before they have that weapon.

But we've seen other countries develop nuclear weapons. In fact, we actually saw North Korea just a few years later actually fully develop a nuclear weapon and we didn't invade North Korea, even though we've got troops right over in South Korea. We didn't actually attack them. It just raises the question of why Iraq? Why did we decide that WMD was more dangerous in Iraq than some of our other adversaries?

Steve Coll

It's a great question. I don't think anyone can answer it with full authority because there's a sort of mystery as to why George W. Bush and so many members of his cabinet pivoted so quickly after 9/11 to the idea that they absolutely had to eliminate Saddam. I think there are two factors that clearly were at play. How much weight you would give to each of them? I don't have high confidence about it. But the first factor is clearly George W. Bush felt there was unfinished business in Iraq - his father's unfinished business, America's unfinished business. That this was a threat that he understood because he had been around the whole story of dealing with Saddam all the way back into the eighties as he came of age politically.

So, he just concluded, you can see it in his documented conversations days, weeks after 9/11, where he doesn't go as far as some of his advisors who say we should just go after Iraq right away, but when he responds to that what he says is we're not going to do that now. We’ve got to go after Al Qaeda. We’ve got to go after the Taliban, but I totally get it. We're going to come back to this as soon as job one is done. So, he was leaning into this idea that it was necessary business and that I can only explain by thinking that his engagement with foreign policy from the time he was governor of Texas to running for president through the months leading up to 9/11 included a sense that Iraq was unfinished business that really had to be addressed.

Then the second point is that Iraq, and this is really relevant to your example of North Korea, was the only WMD threat, perceived WMD threat, in the world that could be invaded without high cost. Basically, we did it because we could. They were prostrate. They didn't have a military. They didn't have a credible deterrent. Everyone has remarked that even without a nuclear weapon, North Korea could effectively deter an invasion because its artillery array and the devastating effects that it could bring to bear on Seoul, a city of 20-25 million people right there on the border, within firing range of North Korean capabilities. That's even before you can go to nukes. Nobody wanted to bear the destruction of South Korea's modern society and its modern economy never mind the death toll that would have ensued.

So basically, you couldn't invade North Korea. You had to accept that deterrence would work. The same was true with Iran. I mean, Iran hadn't broken out as obviously as Iraq, but it did have an incipient nuclear weapons ambition around the late 1990s and early 2000s that they were starting to fiddle around with what then became an even more robust program. But Iran's population, its defense forces, its Revolutionary Guard Forces, its technology… If you'd invaded, you would have had to be prepared for a very costly war. And somehow, because Iraq had been weakened by sanctions for 10-12 years and because its military had been hollowed out, there was an assumption that you could drive straight into Baghdad without a lot of resistance. So that's what they did.

jmk

So, I'm interested in the point that you brought up that George W. Bush thought that he understood Saddam Hussein. That he thought he understood the dictator's mindset because of his father's experience in the First Gulf War comes across to me as a sense of overconfidence in our own abilities and our own knowledge and I think that it dovetails with the fact that at the time we were starting to have much stronger intelligence capabilities than probably ever before with satellite technology and with connections on the ground and all these other places that there was, again, another sense of overconfidence in our own abilities to gather credible intelligence into what was happening in this other country and it creates an odd dichotomy because alongside that overconfidence was also a sense of what we didn't know.

So, there's a sense of fear of what we didn't know that went alongside all of this overconfidence and other things. I mentioned all of that because we do live in a society, like you said before, where we have even greater intelligence capacities, where we feel like we know even more about what's going on in places in the world. There's still the human element that exists that we can look at some of these dictators, some of these people that exist, and these other leaders think that we know what they're thinking, even though we might not really understand those people. Do you think that we could repeat those mistakes again in today's age?

I know that you said that you weren't sure how Iraq would have played out in the digital age, but can you foresee a similar situation in today's age where we have overconfidence in our intelligence and we have overconfidence in how we read people and a fear of what we don't know that we end up deciding to make a mistake in terms of invading another country?

Steve Coll

Yeah, I feel confident that we're continuing to suffer from the same kinds of deficits that you described. I think part of it is structural. Someone like Vladimir Putin and someone like Saddam Hussein, let's just accept that they're smarter than we would like them to be. They're more capable than we sometimes see them because they can be disoriented, they can sound kind of off the reservation, like they really don't understand how the world works. Those are also the features of their cloistered existence. But one of the ways this plays out is that they understand surveillance capabilities of their adversaries. They understand that unless they go for a walk with the best countersurveillance technology protecting them or in the Arctic tundra with their closest general that they might as well just be on broadcast mode because somebody is going to be listening in.

So, if you're on broadcast mode, then what do you say? Is that really reliable? Is our super saturated surveillance actually capturing the inner thoughts and intentions of a leader who understands that he's under surveillance? Probably not. What happened with Saddam was that all of the important truths were in an analog closed circle within a closed circle within a closed circle. He didn't reveal to anyone the fullness of his intentions and actions because he understood that he was vulnerable to having that information reach his enemies and I'm assuming the same is true of Putin. He knows that there's a very limited group of people that he can trust and that he might as well assume in some conversations that the Americans are in the room. So, how do you manage a situation like that?

Just to finish, sort of with a paradox to borrow a word from your franchise that I came around to thinking about Saddam, which is, on the one hand, we got into this pickle because we didn't understand who he was and we didn't have the capacity to see the world from behind his eyes. So, we failed at the basic mission of intelligence around a hostile leader. Having said that, I'm not sure that the cure is available through understanding such people because of the structural problems and because of our deficits - our ability to empathize under pressure in a situation like that. So, then what does that imply?

Probably the best thing to do, and this is a classic formulation of international relations, is not to focus on an adversary's intentions, but to focus on their capabilities and to structure very clear deterrence messages to them that just assumes the worst. Just say, I don't know what you're thinking, but if you decide to go over this border, the following things are going to happen to you. I know you say you would never, never do such a thing as use a nuclear weapon, even a tactical nuclear weapon. But let me just make it clear to you, if you ever use a tactical nuclear weapon, our doctrine is we're going to do the following things and you're not going to want to pay that price. So, let's just talk about something else.

That kind of deterrence worked with Saddam. He didn't use chemical weapons in the First Gulf War, even though he deployed them, because James Baker told him, if you use chemical weapons, your society is going to be in rubble. He didn't mention nukes, but Saddam thought he meant that he would be nuked. So, at the very last moment of decision, he said don't use the chemical weapons. Even someone like that can be deterred. So probably at the end of the day, as much as it matters that we don't have the capacity to understand our adversaries, that doesn't imply that our primary duty to keeping ourselves safe is to look at what people are capable of doing and try to manage that.

jmk

Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining me today. The book again is The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, CIA, and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq. It's a great book that surprisingly I think has a lot of resonance for today and in thinking about international relations in our own time. So, thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Steve Coll

Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.