Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq tells the story of the long runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq over almost 500 pages. Coll essentially traces the entirety of Hussein’s rule, beginning in 1968 when he was part of a group of Baathists who took over the government, to narrate how badly he misunderstood the US, especially the CIA, and its intentions towards him.
Central to Coll’s narration is the CIA’s own profound misunderstandings of Hussein. Coll illustrates how one side’s incomplete or shaded view of the other fed a hugely destructive mutually reinforcing cycle of errors and miscalculations. Though he writes of secretive intelligence organizations, Coll is also treading ground that is familiar to many Americans from their own lived experience, so he faces the challenge of telling a story the ending of which most anyone who picks up the book already knows.
Coll deftly navigates this by lacing together less well-known events with quite public and memorable ones without calling attention to the difference. By writing about incidents of varying degrees of notoriety, Coll manages to elevate the importance of some events that might not otherwise seem noteworthy.
Coll, in other words, offers a richly textured account of what happened in the decades before March 2003. This in and of itself is a hugely impressive feat. Whether, however, such a telling can bring clarity and resolution to an epoch-defining event is a distinct but crucial matter.
Mistrust, Misunderstandings, and Miscalculations
Because Coll zeroes in on the mistrust, misunderstandings, and miscalculations on both sides, he creates a seam: it’s possible both to understand the invasion as completely inevitable, the logical if terrible outgrowth of a decades-long poisonous relationship and to apprehend with specificity so many of the ways that the invasion may have been avoided.
Reviewing the book, Charlie Savage notes: “While some of these events were significant in themselves, many more only seem significant because of what followed.” The moment-by-moment unfolding of events across continents takes on importance both because of what comes next in the book, in Coll’s own narration, but also because of the ineluctable fact of the coming invasion of Iraq by the US.
Coll, in other words, offers a richly textured account of what happened in the decades before March 2003.
Material drawn from “inside Saddam Hussein’s regime” forms the basis of the book. Sources are important to any work of nonfiction, and sources are especially important to works of nonfiction about secretive government agencies. Sources are unimaginably important to a story that turns in so many ways on sources. Coll openly wrestles with what it means to use this material: “Despite the return of the captured records to Iraq, at least a few international scholars still decline to make use of them on ethical grounds, because of their provenance as a kind of war booty. I understand this reluctance. Yet in my four-decade career as a journalist, I have often had to grapple with problematic histories.”
In his review, Spencer Ackerman writes of how differently a book based on these materials might be received in 2002 instead of 2024: “Had the eminent journalist Steve Coll written his new book … back in 2002, his career might have ended …Coll’s book, relying as it often does on newly translated Iraqi documents, couldn’t have been written back when it might hinder a war.”
Global War on Terror
Spotlighting the inner workings of Saddam’s regime over the course of decades can cut in many different directions all at once: but at least two poles are to act as a guide for US audiences of the sheer brutality of his rule, and to serve to humanize someone who may otherwise appear in broad relief instead of sharp detail.
The Achilles Trap in this way completely stands on its own. But for my part it’s also the third in a triptych of his work on the role of the CIA in the Global War on Terror that includes Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 and Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ghost Wars ends its story about the CIA’s activities in Afghanistan prior to 9/11 on the day before the attacks, and Directorate S picks up where Ghost Wars leaves off.
Changing focus from the CIA in Afghanistan before and during GWOT to the CIA in Iraq before and at the beginning of GWOT creates a more fully fleshed out narrative than one involving only one country. So it is that each of these books stands on its own and has its own narrative arc, but together they form an extended, complicated, and perhaps even thorough account.
Previously Off-Limits Territory
In other hands the tale of a spy agency would delve into its inner workings through detailed descriptions of organizational charts and explanations of the function of offices within an agency. The pleasure of such in-depth explorations of secretive organizations isn’t just that it makes an opaque world transparent, though it certainly does. It’s also that the writer generally flags such moves inside as an entrance into new, unfamiliar, and maybe even previously off-limits territory. Coll usually, but not inevitably, dispenses with such moves.
He writes, “He [British Prime Minister Tony Blair] explained that the dossier was based on the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a sixty-year old Cabinet Office body where the chiefs of Britain’s major spy services synthesized intelligence for ministers.” The brief explanatory clause provides just enough information to explain the function of the committee.
More typically, however, he trains his sights on the intersection of people and bureaucracy: “Most case officers spent their careers recruiting and running foreign spies to collect intelligence. But Rueda, who had joined the CIA in 1981, had spent much of his career in the Latin American Division, where covert action had been more commonplace.” The organization and reorganization of offices and the shuffling of personnel only seem to interest Coll insofar as they serve the narrative he builds about the outcomes of the mutual misunderstandings and miscommunications between Baghdad and Washington.
From Memory to History
Although there was highly public and congressional support for the invasion, whether it should happen was deeply divisive. The look and feel of the period, what it was like to live moment-by-moment and day-to-day through those early weeks of 2003 is crucial to the story.
Coll’s focus on Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, George W. Bush, and Hussein himself doesn’t really allow him to consider the points of view of everyday people whose lives would be irrevocably altered by their leaders’ decisions. Even when leaders feel pinched or hemmed in, it’s often because of other powerful political figures, not because of popular opinion or protest or sentiment.
Just after 9/11 this year a friend reflected with me that she’d forgotten so much about that day and wished she could remember it more because of its importance to so much of what came after. So it is with the winter of 2003. That time is sliding from lived experience to memory into history. Those of us who lived through those days, whose lives were torqued by their events, don’t have clear recollections of them. And now that many Americans weren’t even alive during that time there’s a flattening at work. It’s hard for a recitation of the order of events — especially when the end is already known — to fully convey just how destabilizing those days were. After all, while war between the US and Iraq seemed inevitable, it also seemed avoidable.
