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Its been more than two decades since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, starting a war that ultimately lasted eight years, cost tens of thousands of lives, and destabilized the Middle East.

Countless books and news articles have been written about what led to the Iraq War. Told largely from the perspective of western officials, most of them have focused on the United States post-9/11 hunt for weapons of mass destruction that we now know didnt exist.

But a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll provides a fresh perspective on the origins of the war, one that explores the 2003 invasion through the two decades that preceded it and through the eyes of the brutal dictator at the center of it all: Saddam Hussein.

In The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the origins of Americas invasion of Iraq, Coll draws on a wide range of sources to tell a compelling, character-driven story about how the United States bungled its way into an avoidable war with Iraq. But some of the most revealing information in the more than 500-page book comes from transcripts of tape-recorded meetings from inside Saddams regime, including many materials never before published, which were captured by invading U.S. forces.

As Coll notes in the books introduction, he obtained a cache of 145 transcripts and files after settling a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Pentagon with free legal support from attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He also received additional records from the private archive of scholar Michael Brill.

By connecting these and additional parts of the captured files with other sources, including interviews with surviving participants, Coll writes, it became possible to see in new ways what drove Saddam in his struggle with Washington, and to understand how and why American thinking about him was often wrong, distorted, or incomplete.

Ahead of his book tour, the Reporters Committee spoke with Coll about why he decided to team up with RCFP attorneys for the project, how the Saddam tapes provided the books narrative voice, and what the U.S. government can learn from his research about how to deal with other authoritarian foreign leaders. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Primarily, I felt that the mystery of why Saddam did as he did was a neglected part of our understanding of the origins of the decision to invade. Our self-reflection and political arguments about the invasion had concentrated understandably almost exclusively on the decisionmaking in Washington and in London about the threat Saddam seemed to pose, about the bad WMD intelligence, about the public selling of the war, about the medias involvement. All of that had been the way that we had come to terms with the invasion and the discovery that the premise that Iraq had WMD was false.

But why had Saddam created the impression that he had WMD when he didnt? Why did he risk his long run in power and ultimately give up his life for weapons that he didnt possess? That was a question that was almost never asked. And when I learned about the tapes and the other records from his regime, I thought that perhaps there would be a way to tell a multi-sided story to include his part of the bargain into our understanding of where this came from.

I wasnt sure. There were a fair number of materials in a scattershot way that I could access to get a flavor for what they read like, what they felt like. There were conferences that had released excerpts of some transcripts and those materials were still publicly available. I thought they were interesting because they provided an authentic and very unusual case study of the thinking and decisionmaking of a dictator in a closed system, one whose actions and thinking ended up having an enormous impact through the Iraq War on the United States. Its just unusual to get that level of real-time transcripts, even in the U.S. political system.

My ambition was to add to the record substantially by filing a FOIA request that could draw out new materials that maybe had never been released or that were no longer available and still seemed to be important.

In a couple of previous books, I had filed FOIA requests on my own and had had slow but good experiences with extracting useful materials. In those cases, I had a sense of what I was looking for. I would send in my FOIA requests like a stranded survivor throwing a message in a bottle into the sea, hoping that something would come back. Sometimes, in the case of the Exxon book, I didnt hear anything for a long time and I thought, Oh, this is just pointless. Im never going to get anything. And then suddenly, these large envelopes started arriving at my home address some years after I had filed the requests, and I would rip them open and discover what turned out to be good and important materials.

This time, I thought, I cant afford to do it that way. I need professional assistance. I have to run on a more predictable timeline. These materials are too central to the project for me to go alone. So I called the Reporters Committee, and [RCFP Senior Staff Attorney] Adam [Marshall] ended up being my point of contact. He was incredibly helpful in just laying out a process for how I should proceed individually as a filer and what timeline to expect by way of the government failing to do its duty in responding, and then once enough time had passed, then we could talk about litigation. The whole plan made good sense to me, and so thats what we did. And it unfolded almost exactly the way Adam predicted.

My hypothesis about what I should file for was partly based on my own experience with federal FOIA, which is not a great system, the advice I got from Adam and the team, and my analyses of some indexes that were publicly available that provided lists of transcripts, tapes, and other documents with short descriptions saying what they described, and they had dates, so I could see when a conversation had taken place. So I looked through as many indexes as I could find, and I thought and Adam agreed that I should ask for files that were listed in these indexes because they had identification numbers that would make it very easy to locate them so that the government couldnt say, I cant find them, or I have to go dig around a warehouse in Qatar or something like that.

I limited my request to items that were indexed, and then I decided to ask heavily for more recent files because, looking at what was available through scholarship and detritus on the internet, there was a real absence of material from after 9/11 and right up until 9/11. There was a strong bias toward material from the 1980s and 1990s, and I think it was because of the controversies around WMD after the invasion drove a lot of the selection process in the first releases of these materials. People wanted to know, What was the history of the chemical weapons program? How did Saddam talk about using WMD?

There was less on the record about what Saddam was saying and thinking after 9/11. And I was very curious as to why that was and wondered if there was a political bias. Maybe the tapes were embarrassing in some way. I cant explain why there was so little of that material on the record, but once I saw some of those meetings, they were very interesting, and I think they worked really well to bring a completely fresh perspective and voicing onto the page in the part of the history that I figured would be the most familiar to readers, from 9/11 to the invasion. It was challenging because it was the more picked over part of the history, and I had these materials to kind of rewrite the history with Saddams voice very much present.

Well, theres some good stuff (laughs). Thats the main headline.

Its Saddams view of the world at critical junctures [leading up to the invasion of Iraq]. Its the totality of his mindset: his concerns, his paranoia, his conspiracy theories, his reading of the Americans. I would say that is probably over and over again the most interesting thing for the audience that I was trying to write for, which I think isnt just an American audience, but an international one as well. How did Saddam see his own adversaries? We had a theory of him, what was his theory of us? He was very shrewd about matters of power. Obviously he had taken power in very rough circumstances and held it under pressure for a long period of time, so it wasnt surprising to see that he was obsessed with his adversaries and with matters of power and competition among militaries and governments, but the way he thought about that, the way he read the Americans, the way he made his own decisions about whether to cooperate, whether to be aggressive, was absolutely fascinating.

The bonus points were that he was lively. He could be a drudge he rambled on about geopolitical matters and no one ever interrupted him because why would you interrupt someone like that? but he did have a sense of humor. He could be charismatic. There was just an energy in his presence that made it easier to write about him.

As a writer, I had the space to try to really empathize with Saddam, and I had the information available to try to do that in some depth and to try to see the world from behind his eyes. I think you cant help but come away with a sense that, in contemporary affairs, even though we may have a surface impression of adversarial authoritarians, the Saddam case cautions that, in such closed systems, there are almost always many layers of truth behind the surface presentation of a leader that will explain much more than whats visible.

One lesson is that it is in our national interest to maintain contact even with our enemies, even when its morally uncomfortable, even when its politically fraught, because these systems are so closed and there are limits to the insights that are available through other means. It doesnt have to be the president picking up the phone and calling his counterpart. But in Saddams case, we didnt have contact with Saddam or any of his envoys through any channel for like 12 years before the 2003 invasion. In hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. Would we have learned if we had been talking to him or his people that he had kind of lost interest in military affairs toward the end and was obsessed with novel writing? Would we have learned that he issued orders to scientists to make sure that all of the weapons were destroyed and that the documentation was eliminated? Would that have caused us to pause and think, Why is he issuing orders like that? Who knows, but we certainly didnt encounter those facts because we had no access at all.

Yeah, thats the answer. There was a conversation between [President Bill] Clinton and [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair in 1998, when theyre talking about Saddam, and Clinton asked Blair, Has anyone in your foreign ministry talked to Saddam over the last few years? And Blairs like, Id have to check. I dont think so. And Clinton says, If I could, Id pick up the phone and call the son of a bitch, but its so fraught in America that I would just be roasted if I did that, so I cant. But I sort of feel like we should be talking to him.

And its clear from the records that Saddam would have been happy to have a backchannel through his intelligence services or through his family members or any number of channels if we had appointed someone on our side to have those conversations. Would they have been very fruitful? Hard to say. But what is the cost of doing that? Not very high. Its only in domestic politics. And Clintons comment to Blair shows you how intense the pressure is in the White House not to be seen as compromising. And its not only about a presidents political or popular standing, its also that, in these cases, as today, we have sanctions regimes in place. And the effect of the sanctions regimes depends on compliance by allies. So there are good reasons why it doesnt happen, but youre asking an important question, which is, what can we learn from our past failures? And one of them is that you really cant afford to be silent if you think that this adversary can hurt you.

Its kind of the only way I know how to do things, to be honest (laughs). Its what I read, its what I have done before. My niche is to try to synthesize intelligence, political, and military history around Americas encounters with the world, particularly our failures, when we go out and struggle in complex and emerging countries like Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan. Im drawn to the challenge of trying to get the big picture into the book while making it readable. And to me, making it readable means you need characters and you need scenes and dialogue and action. And you need to keep it as brisk as you can while not compromising on the complexity of whats going on.

Ive been practicing this for a long time. And I felt like what was so satisfying about this project was that I could deliver a much higher ratio of fun characters and dialogue and action than I normally can because the transcripts were so lively, because Saddam was kind of a larger-than-life character, and because there was so much action behind the scenes: the defection of [Saddams] son in law, coup attempts by the Americans one after another, a couple of wars.

Working in this genre for so many years, I dont often have material that is like that, start to finish, and I was really grateful for it. It was fun. That was the gift of the transcripts. They provided a bedrock of narrative and voice and dialogue that is essential to make a complicated history like this readable.

The Reporters Committee was just invaluable to this whole project. It was a huge gift to have that collaboration. They are great lawyers. They are really committed to the goal of public interest work. They were very collaborative and careful to make sure that what we were doing was something that I understood and they gave me good, honest advice. I come from a family of lawyers, I live around lawyers, and so I appreciate them. But I also recognize best practices. And they were just excellent. I also thought they were hugely effective and efficient. We didnt waste a lot of time going down rabbit holes. They know their business so they were able to accurately predict and manage the process so that we got a great result without a lot of distraction.

The Reporters Committee regularly files friend-of-the-court briefs and its attorneys represent journalists and news organizations pro bono in court cases that involve First Amendment freedoms, the newsgathering rights of journalists and access to public information. Stay up-to-date on our work by signing up for our monthly newsletter and following us on Twitter or Instagram.

Original post:
Steve Coll discusses collaboration with RCFP attorneys for new book, "The Achilles Trap" - Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press