Lawfare Daily: Steve Coll on Saddam Hussein and the Limits of American Power in the Middle East

[Intro]

Steve Coll: This juxtaposition between private complexity and public dictatorship is the heart of what his lived experience actually was as a human being.

Preston Marquis: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Preston Marquis, Lawfare student contributor with Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq.”

Steve Coll: He's at the poker table. He gets it. He has a weak hand. He keeps bluffing. He keeps playing his cards. And it's all consistent in that he wants to retain his own power and his own potential to get sanctions relief. And he doesn't care about his standing in the international community.

Preston Marquis: Today, I sat down with Steve to discuss his most recent book, “The Achilles Trap”, which unpacks why Saddam Hussein would sacrifice his regime over a weapons program that didn't exist, and why the U.S.-Iraq relationship, notable for Cold War-era cooperation, resulted in conflict decades later.

[Main Podcast]

Given the moment that we find ourselves in fall of 2024, and where we find ourselves with the Middle East in great turmoil, I was wondering if you could lay out for listeners why this was such an important topic for you to come about and cover and what you were hoping to unearth in your research as you delved into the origins of America's invasion of Iraq.

Steve Coll: Primarily it was to enlarge our sense of what the origins were by including the Iraq side of the story. Because for one thing, we had very, it was a closed dictatorship that Saddam Hussein led. Dissent was impossible for political actors in Iraq. There were uprisings against him that he crushed repeatedly and silenced his own large and diverse population.

And so we never really understood what Saddam was thinking and how he was managing his position in this long relationship that he had with the United States before the invasion. And what attracted me to the book was the discovery that, as it turned out, Saddam had tape recorded his leadership conversations as assiduously as Richard Nixon. And that these tapes were in the possession of the U.S. government for the most part, some of them had been translated and released. There were other documents from inside Saddam's regime that could be obtained different ways. Ultimately, I sued the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information Act and got a big batch of materials and then worked with scholars and other researchers who had been nosing around in this area to collect more of these insights from inside Saddam's cabinet and inside his office and his life. And it turned out to be absolutely fascinating.

And so, my hope is that when we think about the errors that led to this catastrophic invasion, we think about the costs that the United States paid in lives, in expenditure, and also the enormous costs that Iraq paid in lives, as a nation being shattered, essentially, by the invasion and still working to find a workable constitutional compact to remain a unified nation, with all of that price that was paid for these decisions to think through the mistakes in light of both sides calculations, not just the errors of American blindness. But the reason, of course and I think your question anticipates this, that it matters so much to us today is not only to understand our own history and our own failures but also to think about the complexity of this multipolar world that we're in now. Which contains a lot of regimes that, there's nothing quite like Saddam's, but there's a lot of authoritarian regimes, middle powers, regional powers that are making really complicated decisions about their relationship with the United States. They may be in conflict with us, they may be on the fence. And I think there is something to take away from this very well documented experience in Iraq, that might be useful looking forward.

Preston Marquis: I think that's totally right. Listening to you discuss, I think, your own contribution to the Iraq War literature, you know, you had a lot of very rich access to first-hand material of Saddam's thinking. And I think, to your point, it helps build out this very vivid picture of his own perspective on sort of the relationships that Iraq maintained across the Middle East and ultimately with the United States. And I'm curious just to pull on that a little bit as you were writing the “Achilles Trap,” I mean, one can imagine that Saddam can be an unreliable narrator of what's going on. And I'm curious for you if it was challenging trying to sort through this high volume of his own recordings, his own transcripts, his own writings, as you were trying to piece together an accurate picture and an objective picture of him and his relationships across the world.

Steve Coll: Yeah, it's a good question, and it took me a while to develop my own convictions and I hope, and I'm sure that, you know, in decades to come, other scholars will go back to these materials and hopefully they'll challenge my own interpretations. But my, the process for me was coming to a full understanding that when Saddam spoke, every time he spoke, almost every time he spoke, it was a performance.

And it was a performance, even at a Cabinet meeting, and even with his inner circle. And you could sense in certain crises, when the problems that he was wrestling with a few comrades that were being reported were kind of an existential nature, you could feel the performance drop a little bit and there would be some urgent, honest exchanges. Of course, it's a little bit presumptuous to say, well, now he's telling the truth. It's not as simple as that. But the repetition of his messages in performance to his comrades did make clear what he was trying to convey and distribute to his deputies as strategy, as thinking that, and that was repeated enough that even though he was a buffoon and continually manipulating them and going off on tangents, he came into these meetings as most presidents with Cabinets do. Like, I want you people to understand what I'm trying to accomplish, why I'm trying to accomplish it so that when you go out and exercise your part of the government's power, you are aligned with me. And by the way, if you're not. I'm going to have you arrested. So please listen carefully.

And that then gave me confidence about what mattered to him at different phases. And he's thinking some of this thinking was consistent across 20 years, but some of it was very situational and opportunistic and tactical. He was continually full of surprises to me because he did have very specific ideas about how to manage the world's great powers and the pressure, they were putting on his regime, particularly after the Kuwait War when he was expelled and under international sanctions. And his logic took a little while to understand, but when you grasp it from his perspective, it makes a certain amount of sense. He was not, he was quite shrewd about how power worked and quite determined to preserve his own.

Preston Marquis: I'm curious, just to stick with Saddam for a second and, you know, thinking about the structure of the title of the book, I thought it might offer an interesting structure of approaching this conversation, right? “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq.” So sticking with Saddam, I'm curious if there were other notable takeaways for you as you got inside Saddam's head. I mean, you've pointed out a couple of them in particular that he did possess a shrewd political insight and that he could be a very demanding, a demanding administrator of the state's affairs.

I think at one point in the book you offer readers a portrait of how he would get up at 5 a.m. and, you know, he had basic tasks of running a state, like many other administrators, budget meetings and the like. And it could be in some of those settings where we might see some of that political insight come out. And it also seems like, as you were painting a picture of him, that he possessed a very deep paranoia, in particular as it related to America's role in the world and Israel's role in the world. And I'm curious how you, how you saw those, some of those competing tensions coming together for Saddam as someone who could possess this shrewdness, but who was also deeply paranoid about the world and his own role in it.

Steve Coll: That's very well said. He was immersed in it, in the political education of his youth. And he never really shook the ideological belief system that he kind of self-educated himself about. He had an uncle who was a tutor. He had a period of exile in Nassarite Cairo. That was a further education. He became swept up in the pan-Arab nationalist movement of the sixties and seventies. And he imbibed certain beliefs about Zionism, about Zionism's capture of American political power, and he was a raw anti-Semite. He absorbed a lot of the blood libel and other kind of familiar narratives that go back centuries, but more particularly acute in the 19th century, early 20th century, all of that he believed. And he never really let go of any of those beliefs.

So, that made him seem paranoid because he perceived things to be organized by this subterranean set of conspirators. And the ones that worried him the most were this triangle that he perceived of the United States, Israel, and Iran. Of course, you know, your listeners will understand that Iran is a nominally Persian society, that majority of the population is Shia. And in Iraq, his Arab nationalism, his form of Arab nationalism, regarded Iran as an innate rival and a source of constant trouble. And he saw the Iranians linking up with the Americans and Israel to bring down his regime.

And he wasn't wrong, just, that, he overthought the problem. And he kept extrapolating from experience into a kind of systemic worldview that didn't serve him well. And it sort of undermined his natural sort of evidence-based shrewdness about his problems, how to stay in power, how to thwart his enemies. He could be very good at the tactical level, but he had this strategic blindness about a worldwide conspiracy that in fact didn't exist. Even though threads of it presented themselves as a real problem here.

Preston Marquis: Absolutely. And I think listeners who may not be fully familiar with the long arc of history among the United States, Israel, and Iran, particularly in today's world, where we appear to be sort of trying to teeter backwards off the brink of a regional war between Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, all these actors. It may be somewhat surprising for folks to even conceptualize that there was a point at which there was some furtive cooperation between, or at least in Saddam's mind between Israel and Iran. And to your point, that imagination seemed to drive a lot of his worldview of and to drive some of that paranoia. It's interesting.

And I think, and I'd be interested for your thoughts on this, in addition to some of these deeply held theories, I think you also portray him, and I used the word earlier, as a bit eccentric. You know, this is a man who I think in the lead up to the U.S. invasion was very focused on perfecting or finishing a novel, right? In addition to or in place of trying to shore up the national defense. And I'm curious, well, did you end up getting to read any Saddam Hussein poetry in your compilation of the book? Or just what were some other interesting takeaways as you came to contextualize Saddam as a human with all of these odd quirks about him.

Steve Coll: Well, you know, he was a peasant who grew up in really hard circumstances, in a really rough neighborhood. He was carrying a gun on the school bus, you know, from 10 or 12 or 15. He belonged to a clan that engaged in murder. He himself committed a shooting that was, might be described as a, you know, revenge justice shooting against someone who had offended some section of their family. And he had very little formal education, but he was the ultimate autodidact. He really had an energetic desire to read and to educate himself. And that led him to value all of the arts. Poetry, novels, films, at one point, and he was, of course, a massive narcissist and, like a lot of dictators, decided that the whole state should be continually celebrating him.

So among the works he commissioned were biographical films. He brought in a guy who had directed James Bond movies to do the final cut of his own story. He commissioned musical versions of his novels which were often kind of a time set narrative of Iraqi nationalism told through his leadership and the essential role that he saw himself playing. And so, he could be hard to figure out. He genuinely saw himself as a patron of the arts and particularly of writing. He had a whole system of subsidies to writers. He would hold, preside over annual writers conferences. And he loved when people wrote poetry celebrating his greatness and he would hold great public events to make sure everyone else heard these poems.

So, you know, I found him forgivably full of himself in some ways, because apart from the terrible violence and horrible cost he imposed, but as a human being. You know, as this biographer of Stalin wrote at the introduction to his Pulitzer Prize-winning first volume of Stalin, as a writer, you have to understand evil in its human form. You have to try to live inside the experience of these individuals in order to unpack the sources of the damage that they caused to the world, to their own societies. And so I found myself drawn to that task during the pandemic. I was working on the book and like a lot of people locked down, pulling out old series to watch on television to pass the time. And with my wife, we watched the Sopranos myself for the second time, but her for the first time. We were about four episodes into the first season. It was like, oh yeah, that's Saddam. Saddam and Tony Soprano have a lot in common. They have these full complicated family lives that are the essence of what they're trying to organize their power for, but which they can't manage any more successfully than a lot of other Arab patrons.

And in any event, this juxtaposition between private complexity and public dictatorship is the heart of what his lived experience actually was as a human being. And so you can't just describe the hundreds of thousands of people who suffered under his rule in isolation from these motivations, I think in order to really grasp what his history was made of.

Preston Marquis: I think that's fair. One of the other striking contributions, I think, from “The Achilles Trap” is how he has to navigate those family relationships. I am taken with your reference of the Sopranos, because it does seem like, on some level, Saddam's ability to manage the family drama is intertwined with how he governed the Iraqi state. I mean, is that fair? How would you characterize the role that Saddam's family plays in this tale?

Steve Coll: Well, he put them into every key position that required trust, which meant all of the important positions in a state that was run by the secret police. So he had relatives always as ministers of defense, interior. He had them in charge of his inner bodyguard. And then there was an informal inner circle, kitchen cabinet, that also was made up entirely of relatives. The only exceptions were a few individuals who were, for example, in charge of diplomacy, like Tariq Aziz, who was a Christian and didn't have a political base that threatened him.

He was very worried about the scenario of generals who weren't loyal to him, who had possession of aircraft or tanks and could roll against him in a coup d'etat of the sort that he himself had participated in when the Ba'ath Party took power. So he relied, he needed his relatives. But then his relatives were of uneven quality and even though they might well be loyal, although he did have one major defection during his rule that I write about, quite a big drama, for the most part he could count on their loyalty. The alternative was exile or death, but he couldn't regulate their competence or their character. And so, he had two sons, one of whom was, you know, completely unreliable. And he never even appointed to a significant position in government, because even as his father, and this was his eldest son, Uday, the notorious Uday, he couldn't see giving Uday the keys to any ministry that, that might have the potential to disrupt his rule. He didn't trust his own son.

And so he was always looking for relatives that were capable, and it frustrated him that, you know, he had half-brothers who he appointed as minister of the interior. The guy would get in his car and drive around and shoot at traffic lights, get drunk, and make a fool of himself in public, which reflected poorly on Saddam. That was part of his frustration with his relatives. Not only that they were incompetent and lazy, and disruptive in their behavior, but that they undermine his credibility with the public.

Preston Marquis: That's so interesting. In particular, I recall the anecdote you include about that complicated relationship with his eldest son, Uday. And I think, and I will let listeners pick up the book and read it firsthand, but there's one point at which Uday tries to kill Saddam, or at least they reach a, they have a quarrel that reaches violent proportions.

Steve Coll: Yes. I concluded after all of this four years of research, one of the big subjects in any treatment of Saddam has to be the attempts to eliminate him. The United States tried again and again to eliminate him, both at war and through covert action, and failed. And he had many other rivals internally who would like to have seen him gone. They had made attempts and failed. Israel certainly would have liked to see him eliminated. I'm not aware of any direct bombing attempts against him, but he was afraid of them for good reason. And so all these people swung and missed. Nobody really got close. The one person who almost killed him would have changed history was his eldest son.

Preston Marquis: Was his own son. Right.

Steve Coll: He goes up with a live AK-47 and goes so far as to shoot it off at the feet of Saddam's half-brother Barzan outside the door, and inside the living room of Saddam. And if he burst into the room with that gun, he very well, who knows. But anyway, that was, that is the closest documented case of someone with motive and means being within, you know, 15 feet of Saddam Hussein.

Preston Marquis: Ability, opportunity, intent, certainly. So, I want to pivot here, and you have mentioned how, despite many efforts, the CIA, or at least in Saddam's mind, the CIA was coming after him, Israel was coming after him.

And there is truth to that. You unearth and chronicle how three successive presidents, President George H. W. Bush, President Clinton, President W. Bush, all sign covert action findings authorizing the CIA to seek regime change in Iraq.

But I want to rewind the tape a little bit because that's not the full story. In fact, that's not even, it may even only represent half the story because as you talk about the CIA during this period, there is this effort at an intelligence partnership, at this cooperation during the 1980s. And I was wondering if you could unpack for listeners who may be less familiar with the role that the CIA played during this time, during the Iran-Iraq War. Like, what were policymakers trying to achieve during this intelligence partnership? And do you believe it was, that approach was effective?

Steve Coll: So, what they were trying to achieve was to prevent more or less as the case today, and which is one troubling aspect of today's crises in the Middle East, which is that Iran has achieved substantial political and militia influence inside Iraq as a result of the elimination of Saddam's dictatorship. So during the 1980s, the same problem was on the minds of Reagan administration policymakers. It was Saddam who started the war with Iran unnecessarily in September of 1980 and immediately got bogged down. It looked like it would be a grinding stalemate for a while, but in 1982, the Iranians broke through Iraqi lines and looked as if they might be driving on Baghdad as their next step. Ayatollah Khomeini was in full power, the Iranian revolution had consolidated, it had announced its international ambitions. It was now involved in Lebanon and was emphatically anti-American.

And the Reagan administration feared that if the Iranians broke through and took Baghdad and overthrew and executed Saddam, which is what Ayatollah Khomeini kept promising he would do, that it could be a disaster within the larger disaster of the Middle East. And so administration secretly authorized the CIA to go to Baghdad and provide Saddam with satellite photographs of Iranian military positions. So as to prevent the Iranian drive on Baghdad and this officer, Thomas Dwightman, who's still alive, who was then a Near East Division officer, went into to Baghdad with only half an invitation and tried to build this liaison.

Long story short, the book goes into this in colorful detail, I think, and in any event, he succeeded in opening the door to cooperation with Saddam. And successive CIA officers provided Saddam secretly with the advantage of American satellite eyes on the battlefield, which neither Iraq nor Iran had the capacity for directly at that time, and it made a difference in prolonging the stalemate. Saddam was always suspicious of the CIA, but he welcomed their cooperation because his generals told him that the photographs were not doctored. He assumed that the pictures were probably fake. His generals said, no boss, like there really are those tanks on the other side of the hill and it's very helpful to be able to see them when we can't. And so he kept the intelligence coming.

Just to finish because it does have implications for everything that followed. All along Saddam, if you listen to the tapes of his conversations with his comrades about this relationship with the CIA, all along he's the one thinking there's something wrong here. First he says the picture's probably not reliable. Then he says, I'll tell you, whatever they're giving to us, they're also giving to the Iranians. And, you know, a lot of his more diplomatic aides would say, well, boss, of course you're always right, but it doesn't seem like, that seems a little paranoid. Then in 1986, the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed. And it turned out that yes, the United States in a boneheaded effort to free hostages in Lebanon had cooperated with Israel in providing military assistance to Iran to help its side in the war. Saddam felt vindicated by that. And he never forgot the betrayal. He referred to it all through the 1990s and in the run up to the 2003 invasion, he would say to his colleagues, look, remember, that is the way the world is organized. They're always out to get us, even if they appear to be friendly. So, he always kept the cooperation at a sort of transactional level. And the CIA, for its part, wanted more, but was content with what they got, which was the prevention of Iranian success in the Iran-Iraq War.

Preston Marquis: And it seems like things change after the Gulf War, both in terms of the overall U.S. relationship with Iraq, but also in terms of what the CIA was trying to accomplish, with regard to Iraq. And it seems like you take a much more critical view of the CIA's operational and analytic efforts during the 1990s, as it relates to the covert action, the collection piece of trying to even get close to Saddam and ultimately analytically trying to understand or to pierce the veil on the truth of his WMD program. Could you talk a little bit about that shift in terms of how the CIA goes from passing intelligence to Saddam in the 1980s to unsuccessfully trying to overthrow him in the 1990s and the 2000s?

Steve Coll: Yes, I mean, it originates in the Gulf War. The CIA had succeeded in the 1980s in carrying out what the White House asked them to do and in getting the result that U.S. policymakers wanted, and which was in, arguably, in U.S. interests and Iraqi interests, in some perverse way, given malign effect that Iranian influence has in the country today. But, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, of course, we all remember George H. W. Bush organized a global coalition to expel the Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restore the Emirates’ royal family. However, George H. W. Bush did not believe that it made sense to drive on Baghdad and see Saddam's overthrow despite the outrageousness of his conduct invading and occupying Kuwait. And, in the aftermath of the war, having achieved the objective of expelling Iraq from Kuwait, but still having Saddam sitting in Baghdad. In May, of that year, so not long after the war's end, George H. W. Bush, who was a former CIA director, signed the finding necessary to create a covert action program to facilitate, you know, to create conditions in which Iraqis themselves would decide to move against Saddam.

So it wasn't quite the Hollywood version of ordering his death or even ordering any program that would put U.S. aircraft into a coup attempt in Baghdad. It was a more indirect attempt to recognize that Saddam had an opposition both outside the country and inside the country, that many Iraqis, including his own generals, were disgusted by the price their country had paid for this ill-conceived invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the devastating loss of the war that followed.

So it was, you know, natural to think somebody's going to take matters into their own hands, so let's help them. That was the purpose of the covert action. And, you know, there's an old saw at the CIA and in intelligence policy circles that the best way to have a failed covert action is to see it as a silver bullet, as a substitute for national policy. That, you know, notwithstanding Hollywood, the CIA is not on its own capable of solving international problems that, for example, the U.S. military is unable to solve, or U.S. diplomats are unable to solve, or that the whole of government of the United States, a superpower can't quite figure out how to achieve an end. Okay, let's call it the CIA. Maybe they'll figure it out. Well, they're game. That's their role. They like to be called into action and they often advertise their successes and mumble about their records of maybe not such successful covert actions, but there's always somebody at the CIA who's ready to carry out a covert action if the president asks. It's a lawful, it's a lawful action.

And so there were plenty of people during the ‘90s who, after this original finding by George H. W. Bush was renewed by the Clinton administration, would advertise the potential of a silver bullet coup d'etat against Saddam. And that led to, you know, some tragic failures in the field where Iraqis, who collaborated with the CIA, paid the ultimate price for these attempts. They were ill conceived and, you know, within the CIA, to be fair, there are plenty of people, not just analysts, but operators who are skeptical about these kinds of covert actions that are so divorced from the other sides of U.S. foreign policy that are being used as kind of silver bullet strategies. But there were lots of gung-ho folks from time to time who stepped up.

And in my interviews, I was struck by some of the station chiefs in the field who were given these orders and who themselves became frustrated as the 90s went on, that they didn't really have the backing of the government, that they were being asked to do something that was almost performative, and that was costing their Iraqi partners, their lives without any real prospect of success. And one of them, a station chief who was in Oman for a while, resigned from the CIA, just, you know, in frustration over this kind of half measure approach that they had to carry out at high cost in Iraqi lives. So that, that was the, that's the sort of summary of what happened.

And the last chapter is, by 1998, when George Tenet was promoted to become deputy director and eventually director, the lesson had been learned on the seventh floor at the CIA that this kind of wishful coups d'etat were not going to work. And in fact, then the CIA started to advise the White House around 1998. Don't count on us to solve your Saddam problem. We've tried, doesn't work. We've learned a painful lesson. His security systems are so layered. We have so little penetration. We don't even, we haven't even had an embassy in the country since 1990. We can't go outside in against this target. So you're going to have to come to terms that if you want him removed, you're going to have to invade, in effect, was the message that the CIA itself sent after they had tried and failed. And that unfortunately led to this regime change policy that was kind of bipartisan, started in the 90s, and ultimately undergirded the logic of the 2003 invasion. Because when, after 9/11, Bush said who will rid me of Saddam Hussein, the file on Saddam included a self-assessment by the CIA that they couldn't do the job and it was going to require the full force of the United States military.

Preston Marquis: It almost sounds like the invasion in 2003: it's the culminating point of over a decade of maybe under the table efforts by successive presidents, first H.W. Bush and then Clinton, to try to, forgive me, have their cake and eat it too, where they wanted something that could be plausibly deniable. But was ultimately successful in sort of taking this problem off the table. And ultimately, I think, as you pointed out, and as the CIA pointed out, covert action has to be part of a broader foreign policy. It seems like that was at least one, one learning that sort of contemplated the larger invasion that happened in 2003. Is that fair?

Steve Coll: Yes, I think it is fair. And I, you know, I was struck by how this happened in the 90s. You know, Bill Clinton really didn't want to have to deal with Iraq, but Iraq kept coming into his office. And you know, he regarded it when he was elected as, well, he had defeated George H.W. Bush who he obviously respected, ended up working with a lot in his first presidency, but he had defeated, he'd run against him on the grounds that, that Bush was too busy solving the world's problems and not paying enough attention to the economic troubles at home, and that he was going to be a domestic policy president.

And so in his first term, particularly, he said to his national security advisor, I don't, keep Iraq away from me. And there was a containment policy in place that included no fly zones. It was expensive. It involved a lot of American overflights, but he was contained. And yet Saddam kept breaking out of the box. And so, you know, these covert actions seemed more and more tempting to Clinton as the years went by and he couldn't get this Iraq problem off his desk. So it was more in the mid-90s, right around his reelection in ‘96. He finally said to the agency, look, if you really think this can work, I'm ready to back you now because I've had enough of this. It's distracting. It's draining our resources. It's inhibiting our ability to do other things. We can get rid of them. Let's do it. And that's what led to the mistakes in the field.

The other thing I was struck by was how this regime change policy, apart from the finding that the CIA couldn't pull it off, this broad idea that nothing could change in U.S. foreign policy until Saddam was gone was really a product of the Clinton administration. They embraced it under pressure from Republicans in Congress. It was an easy thing to pronounce because there was no real prospect that it would be carried out by U.S. military invasion at the time. Only 9/11 created those conditions politically. But it was it was something that many Democrats had signed up for during the late Clinton years, and that explains why, when Congress voted to support the Bush administration's invasion in 2003, you had you know, Hillary Clinton and the likes of Al Gore, who wasn't in Senate at the time, in support, because they had already been there. They had seen this as the only solution, even before 9/11.

Preston Marquis: I think what this discussion is doing is it's easing us into sort of the final section of the title of the book, right? “Saddam Hussein, the CIA and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq.” And what I'd love to hear you discuss is how you sort of piece together some of these broader lessons, because I think a central thesis of the book is answering the question of why would Saddam Hussein ultimately put his regime at risk in the eyes of the Americans over a weapons of mass destruction program that didn't exist, but which the Americans believed existed and which was a, which was another piece of the drive towards the invasion? And I'm curious, just at a high level, what did you learn? Why would Saddam Hussein carry out this strategy of deception and disruption of the inspections and whatnot, when he knew that it could ultimately just build additional opposition to him in the international community?

Steve Coll: Well, he too wanted to have his cake and eat it too. And it goes back to the demands that were placed on him after he lost the war over Kuwait. So in the summer of 1991, after the Iraqi forces were expelled from Kuwait, the united Security Council at the UN, including Russia, Soviet Union, becoming Russia, and China, all imposed harsh sanctions on Iraq, almost a total embargo, and demanded Iraq's complete disarmament of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, as well as the infrastructure to produce them, as well as missiles that can carry them beyond Iraq's borders. And they, this was a forced disarmament, and the Security Council was clear, you're not going to get relief from sanctions, this, essentially a blockade of Iraq, until you demonstrate that you've destroyed all of these WMDs that you have burnished in the past.

And Saddam confronted with this problem, his goal was to get out of sanctions as fast as possible and he wanted money to flow to his regime so that he could remain in power. And the first inspectors in their white coats and their clipboards led by Swedes and experts in all of these fields of weapons were arriving and rather than cooperate with them, which would have been humiliating. So that's the first answer to your question. He didn't want to participate in the destruction of his military-industrial complex on live television with a bunch of foreigners in white coats humiliating him by tearing down everything that he had built up during his modernization drive.

Second, he thought that if he actually destroyed the weapons, but didn't, you know, admit it, that the inspectors wouldn't find anything. And once they couldn't find anything, then he figured that France or Russia or other half-allies that he had relied on in the past to do his business at the UN, that they could help him wiggle out of sanctions. So he ordered his son-in-law to destroy everything, essentially in the dark of night before the inspectors could turn up. And you have this image of, you know, trucks rolling into the desert in the dark with vats of chemical weapons and just pouring them into the sand. Nobody took any pictures. Nobody kept any inventories. There were no records, and so, when the inspectors came, sure enough, they couldn't find anything. And Saddam was hoping that he would get sanctions relief.

So fast forward all the way through the 90s. That was the original sin of the confusion. He did something that doesn't make sense to us. He destroyed what he was asked to destroy, but he didn't do it in a way that was transparent enough to convince the international community he'd actually done it. And he did it so haphazardly and he lied about it so frequently, that in the end, inspectors quite reasonably believed that he must not have actually done it. Why would he be lying about it? We can help you, if you'll tell us the truth, maybe you will get sanctions relief. He never believed that he would get sanctions relief and he was also right about that.

You know, in the end, the Clinton administration announced that in a speech that Madeleine Albright gave in 1997, after being lied to by him and frustrated by him for so many years, they said, look, it doesn't matter if he disarms, we're not going to really, we're not going to support sanctions relief until he's gone. And that only confirmed what he'd always told his comrades, you know, this carrot of sanctions relief, it's an illusion. They want me gone. So why should we cooperate? We're not going to get anything for it. And that was his policy, which created enormous confusion in the American analytical community. But when you roll the clock back and look at it from his perspective, you can see he's at the poker table. He gets it. He has a weak hand. He keeps bluffing. He keeps playing his cards. And it's all consistent in that he wants to retain his own power and his own potential to get sanctions relief. And he doesn't care about his standing in the international community.

Preston Marquis: It's interesting because, to listen to that logic, because it's quite twisted, but if you're him, it makes perfect sense. It's like, well, why would I cooperate with them? They're just trying to destroy me anyway. Well, let's destroy it in secret because if they can't find anything, maybe they'll let me off the hook. It's, you know, I think it gets back to what we were discussing earlier about this, this attempt, you know, this competing, these competing narratives in Saddam's character, right? The shrewd political insight, the calculating machinations that he has, but also this deep paranoia, which ultimately seems to frustrate a lot of his designs.

But, I think, Steve, your book is also, it's a story of misunderstandings on both sides, right? And you've covered very well how Saddam misunderstood, sort of, how his actions would be received in the broader community. But I think there's also a part of your book that discusses how America either misread this deception or missed opportunities to get closer to the truth or to steer Saddam off this course. Could you discuss America's part in, in this tragedy, sort of in the 90s as we walk ourselves up to this invasion in 2003?

Steve Coll: Yeah, I think the first point is that we blinded ourselves in, certainly in hindsight, unnecessarily, and primarily because of domestic political pressure rather than some intelligence or foreign policy calculation that we shouldn't be in contact with Saddam. We didn't talk to Saddam even secretly from the end of the Gulf War in 1991 all the way until the invasion. We had no back channel. He wanted conversation. He was, that was part of his tactical strategy for wiggling out of sanctions. He wanted to be in contact. He wanted to talk about areas of mutual interest. Like he was opposed to Islamist terrorism when that started to rear its head in the 90s. Didn't we want to talk about that? Maybe we could cooperate. You know, should we talk about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Everybody wanted Iraq to come out of the rejections camp and join Jordan and other Arab states in facilitating an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Would he listen to a conversation about that? He wanted to talk. We refused.

There's this one phone conversation I came across in the Clinton Library between Clinton and Tony Blair, soon after Blair became prime minister in 1997. And Clinton, they're talking about Saddam and you can hear the weariness in Clinton's voice. He's been through this before. Blair's confronting the problem in his inbox for the first time and Clinton asked him, look, do your people, do they talk to Saddam? Is that, do you know, is anybody in the Foreign Office talking to him? And Blair says, you know, I'm just here. I don't think so, but I'll check. And then Clinton says, you know, because if I could, I'd pick up the phone and call the son of a bitch. That's literally what he says. And, but I'd be roasted for it here in Washington because I would be seen by Republicans in Congress as a sign of weakness or appeasement. And so I can't do it. And it just seems sad in retrospect that, you know, there was no way to develop the kind-. And if you don't want to do it in public because it's politically costly, that's what you have an intelligence service for, then go find some back channels.

United States, you know, managed to talk to Iran about its nuclear program through, you know, the facilitator in Oman in secret for years and years and years. And we still don't really know all the content of those conversations. It can be done. But the fact that we didn't do it meant that we didn't have an opportunity to understand some of the complexity of his calculations, why he might have made this inexplicable decision to destroy things in secret and then not complain about it. Why he had lost interest in some of the militarism that characterized his younger self, that he was writing novels all day, that he disappeared for long periods of time. Just insights that might have allowed us to see more clearly in the heat after 9/11, that he wasn't the same threat that he had been when he invaded Kuwait. And so deliberately shutting off contact with authoritarians, even awful ones who are enemies of the United States just seems self-defeating. That was one of the big lessons that came out of the 90s.

Preston Marquis: And I wonder if you might touch on one of the other lessons that I think your book illustrates well in the particularly related to the role of messaging and deterrence. And I'm here referencing the run up to the Gulf War and Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Could you discuss with listeners a little bit of your thesis? Because I think it's interesting about how, there's an interesting counterfactual that you pose in the book about how stronger messaging up front perhaps might have prevented the, his invasion of Kuwait and then perhaps might have changed the ultimate arc of the U.S.-Iraq relationship through the 90s and the lead up to the invasion. But would you, could you unpack that for us a little bit?

Steve Coll: Yeah, sure. I mean, there's a, you know, there's a discourse that's still with us today that there are certain leaders, certain dictatorships whose leaders are undeterrable either because they're fired by religious zeal or because they're just crazy. And I've always been skeptical of that. I mean, it may be ultimately true of some dictator who has nuclear weapons or other dangerous weapons. But the record so far is that where deterrence is clear, it often works, even with people who appear to be irrational. And in Saddam's case it clearly did work when it was attempted.

And the case study that I think demonstrates this is related to the war in Kuwait. So the Bush administration failed to deter Saddam from invading Kuwait in the first place. That's a separate story. There was an opportunity, I think, to deter him, but it was missed. After he invaded, the principal worry was that he was going to use chemical weapons against American troops. That was a live fear because he had used chemical weapons during the Iran War prodigiously. So George H.W. Bush sent James Baker, Secretary of State, to meet with Tariq Aziz, Saddam's principal diplomat, and Baker carried a really hardcore deterrence message.

You know, we don't have the full written text of it, but essentially, he said, we're about to go to war. You appear not to be willing to voluntarily withdraw from Kuwait as we've demanded. You're stupid for not doing that because you're going to lose this war and it's going to be brutal and we're going to fight a regular war, but I’m telling you this right now. We're just going to expel you from Kuwait. It's going to be a war like you fought before. But if you gas American troops it's going to be something entirely different. We're going to destroy you. We're going to destroy your regime and we're going to send Iraq back to the proverbial stone age. That is the red line. You have to fight this war by conventional means alone and if you don't, it's going to change everything.

And Tariq Aziz heard that because it was delivered clearly, brought it back to Saddam. And what we know is that Saddam had deployed gas weapons forward so that he had the option to use them against American troops, just as the Americans feared. But when that deterrence message came in, he ordered that they not be used and not one gas shell was fired during the war. So what you can, I think the only reasonable thing to conclude is that even with Saddam, a clear existential deterrence message works.

And, to me, in this really complicated, muddy world that we're in now, where nuclear proliferation is going to be a rising concern, where there are middle powers with drones and other means to do great harm outside their borders, even without nuclear weapons, that we have to remind ourselves that this isn't a world of crazy people. They're self-interested. They're concerned with preserving their own power. We may find them distasteful and evil, but we don't want to harm ourselves by failing to be clear about what our red lines are and then to back those up, when necessary. I just think when the world is this dangerous, having clarity about deterrence messages is not something to talk yourself out of because it's, you know, it scares people or that it's complicated in domestic politics. I think it's a, an important, we have a clear record that it's an important part of our own security.

Preston Marquis: Steve, just as we approach the end of our conversation today, I want to stick with that final topic of zooming out and thinking about perhaps broad takeaways and in this regard, it strikes me that there are parallels here and how you have approached your seminal works. For example, “Ghost Wars” is the story of the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, ultimately leading up to 9/11, and “The Achilles Trap” is, in many respects, the secret history of the CIA, Iraq slash Saddam Hussein, and the lead up to America's invasion of Iraq. And I'm curious if you in studying this history, in studying America's role in the Middle East and South Asia during the 1980s, sort of the peace dividend of the 90s and then ultimately these conflicts of the early 2000s, if you've taken any broad lessons away about the CIA's role, or perhaps what we might think about in terms of America's broad engagement with these parts of the world over the course of history.

Steve Coll: Yes. I mean, I think we talked about some of the lessons, so I don't want to repeat the way you've drawn these out. And I think, frankly listed them correctly from my own perspective about what's important. So having contact with enemies, and the rest.

You know, we have lived in a world of rising complexity that has unfolded while we have enjoyed a distinctive period of global power. And we are not a post-imperial country. We didn't run empires. We didn't build up a giant global civil service the way the British and the French did. We have often exercised our power without either the historical knowledge of the societies that we're getting involved in or seeking to influence, or without really an instinct that we should be developing that kind of imperial civil service by other names. I mean, there was a period in our counterinsurgency ambitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we felt a little explicitly imperial, like we're just going to send civil servants out to provincial reconstruction teams and they're going to have guns around them. And somehow they're going to figure out the tribal balance and build the wells in the right places and peace will break out.

I mean, that was our kind of high imperial moment, but generally as a society, you know, we're, we tend towards isolation as our own foreign policy discourse suggests now. And we don't have a long record of trying to anthropologically understand, you know, societies and nations elsewhere. And so, when we get involved at that level of political and military complexity, the record in these two cases show we really don't do very well, and so how can we come to terms with the necessity of globalization.

We can't live in isolation from the rest of the world. We are going to find ourselves in complicated relationships and conflicts. We don't want to become an imperial civil service. So, so how can we, within our own means, within our own democratic setup, with all of the brilliant, you know, young people coming out of our universities and graduate schools with all of the wealth that we have to invest in our own enterprise abroad, foreign policy, how can we do better? Like how can we learn the lessons of our own failures and at least attempt to engage with, you know, without this black and white perspective that we seem often to bring to these complex problems. That's the frustrating thing.

I mean, anybody who's been a diplomat or a foreign correspondent or a spy, I imagine in most cases, who’s been out there in the world and lived in these kinds of societies, they know that the only thing you could really say about them is they're truly complex and they demand respect in their complexity. They demand humility because they're so complex. Even their own leaders can't figure out their own people half the time. So to go in there with a theory of the case, that is some kind of unilateral ideology about American power and globalization is just a prescription for failure, and we've had enough failures. So how do we do better?

Preston Marquis: We'll leave it there. Steve Cole, author of “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq.” Thanks so much for coming in today.

Steve Coll: Thanks, Preston. Thanks for your good questions. I appreciate it.

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