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THE ACHILLES TRAP: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of Americas Invasion of Iraq, by Steve Coll

People love to imagine that world affairs are a game of chess, played by judicious leaders trying to outwit each other, acting with perfect self-knowledge and a clear understanding of what their opponent might do. But consider Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu or Yahya Sinwar. There can be a tragic mismatch between the interests of a nation and the self-interest of its leaders. The people running the show are people. They act on their whims, and with myopic agendas. They screw up. Call it the frail man theory of history.

This cosmic, unavoidable inefficiency is the real subject of Steve Colls excellent The Achilles Trap, a chronicle of the lead-up to the Iraq war. In telling this history, he offers a useful reminder that Americas omniscience is just as likely to be overestimated as are the capabilities and intentions of most world actors.

Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has written a suite of books about Americas entanglements in the Middle East. The Achilles Trap is clearly intended as a parallel project to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, a history of the C.I.A.s role in the wars in Afghanistan. The new book stretches from Saddam Husseins earliest days in power to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

At its heart lies an engrossing portrait of Hussein, which is drawn from interviews with U.S. officials, U.N. weapons inspectors and surviving members of the dictators government as well as what Coll calls the Saddam tapes: 2,000 hours of rarely accessed audio from high-level meetings that Hussein recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon. The resulting details he assembles give a more intimate picture of the dictators thinking about world politics, local power and his relationship to the United States than has been seen before.

The American side of the lead-up to the Iraq war has been well documented, particularly the George W. Bush administrations megalomaniac ideologues and their intelligence failures. (And the C.I.A.s Iraq operation was nicknamed The House of Broken Toys long before anyone was talking about yellowcake or slam dunks.) Coll briskly moves past those preoccupations, which he chalks up, as others have, to confirmation bias: The United States assumed that Hussein was lying when he disavowed plans to possess and use weapons of mass destruction because hed possessed and used them before.

The richer narrative vein that Coll explores is the other confirmation bias thats been much less understood: that of Saddam Hussein, whose great mistake was in thinking that the United States was all-powerful and always competent. As Hussein later told U.S. investigators about his occupation of Kuwait in the early 1990s, If you didnt want me to go in, why didnt you tell me? Hussein also figured the C.I.A. knew he had no W.M.D.s. A C.I.A. capable of getting such a big question dead wrong on the facts, Coll writes, was not consistent with Saddams bedrock assumptions.

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Book Review: The Achilles Trap, by Steve Coll - The New York Times