The Achilles Trap

above all, impossible to reduce to a simple explanation. Successive American presidents misjudged him. They often dismissed him as a cartoon autocrat, akin to the faux Adolf Hitler played for laughs by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. Certainly, Saddam Hussein was as unsubtle as a shotgun blast. He was a cruel tyrant directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as for the torture or imprisonment of many tens of thousands more. Without serious provocation, he invaded two of his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait.During the Iran-Iraq War, he gassed Iranian troops and his own rebellious Kurdish population. During the Gulf War, he lobbed terrifying Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel. He plastered Iraq with his image to promote his cult of personality. His speeches were often bombastic and alarming. Against such a record, it seems more than a little odd to argue that Saddam s enemies failed to grasp important nuances of the man and his rule through the Baath Party. Yet as America s tragic invasion to eliminate a nonexistent WMD arsenal amply demonstrated,there was more to Saddam than Washington s politicians and spies could grasp even when the stakes were very high.

The Achilles Trap is an investigation into how this failure of comprehension unfolded. It seeks to enlarge the story of the 2003 invasion s origins by elevating Saddam s side of the conflict and by adding substantial new information. Saddam left an extraordinary and still mostly secret trove of about two thousand hours of tape recordings of his leadershipmeetings private discussions he recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon as well as meeting minutes, intelligence files, and other materials. They document what the Iraqi leader was saying privately at turning points of his struggle against the United States. The

and compulsively readable . . . Similar to Ghost Wars, Coll s 2004 history of the C.I.A. s encounters with Osama bin Laden before 9/11, the action is cinematic, moving from the Situation Room to the mountains of Kurdistan to the sixth floor of the C.I.A. s original headquarters in Langley, Virginia . . . Coll s book includes plenty of examples of Saddam s cruelty and lust for vengeance, even against members of his own family. Yet the picture that emerges is of a more confounding figure, a power-obsessed but pedantic strongman who wrote romance novels in his spare time, corrected state-TV presenters for grammatical mistakes, and agonized over the failings of his eldest son, Uday. Air Mail

This is the book I ve been hoping for . . . Steve Coll has doggedly obtained documents and interviews to illuminate the Iraq perspective of events from the beginning to end of the Saddam Regime . . . Moreover, he does all this via an entertaining narrative featuring an array of fascinating characters. The Cipher Brief

[Coll] draws on a mountain of documents, interviews, and Saddam Hussein s transcripts and audio tapes, to examine the decades-long history of misunderstandings and missteps on both sides that led to a war that killed some 200,000 Iraqi civilians and thousands of American service personnel and contractors. The Achilles Trap is likely to be the best account of these developments we will ever have. Jerusalem Post

[C]lear, readable, and meticulous . . . Coll presents a lively narrative packed with eye-catching details. Foreign Affairs

[Coll is] a groundbreaking reporter and researcher who is able to uncover new information in a tightly wound arena, but also a deft stylist with a natural gift for both narrative structure and fluent yet surprising writing. Like a baseball player who can both pitch and hit with the best, the rare union places Coll at or near the apex of the craft . . . Though the events of The Achilles Trap concluded 20 years ago, there are few better roadmaps to where American foreign policy in the Middle East has ended up today. BookPage (starred review)

[A] tour de force examination of the events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq . . . That the invasion ultimately proved disastrous has been well documented by others, but Coll s unparalleled research into its background turns up a great deal of unfamiliar, illuminating information. Required reading for all conscientious citizens. Kirkus

Coll (Directorate S., 2018) draws on an enormous cache of unpublished documents here, many obtained by persistent FOIA requests, pertaining to the efforts of both sides in the roller coaster of U.S. and Iraqi relations over three decades. The result is a deep dive that illuminates previously unstudied and unexamined aspects of personalities, policies, events, and reactions of great consequence to both countries. Coll's chronicle is powerful and compelling, detailing many mistakes and failures by intelligence and elected officials that led to the disastrous invasion and occupation in 2003 . . . Expertly researched and written, the latest from Pulitzer Prize winner Coll is a cautionary tale for the ages. Booklist