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

On Friday, March 6, Laugh Fair and Georgetown Law are bringing together leading scholars,

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event on what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to the public, in person and online. Visit LaughFairMedia.org/ECPAEvent. For details and to register. I'm Marissa Long in Turnet Lawfare, with an episode from Laugh Fair Archive for March 14,

26, on February 28, the United States and Israel launched coordinated air strikes against

Iran as part of a campaign to destabilize the regime and its nuclear capabilities. At least 1,270 people have reportedly been killed in Iran as a result of the attacks, including

“Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali-Khamene.”

The last major US-led attack in the Middle East was the 2003 invasion of Iran, in its effort to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. For today's Archive, I chose an episode for September 26, 2024, in which Steve Cole joined Preston Marquis to discuss Cole's book The Achilles Traff. On the lessons learned from the US invasion of Iraq, including the limitations to success

and US military operations in the Middle East and more. It's the Laugh Fair podcast. I'm Preston Marquis, Laugh Fair student contributor with Steve Cole, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of The Achilles Traff. Saddam Hussein, the CIA and the origins of America's invasion of Iraq.

These at the poker table, he gets it as a weekend, 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 with you. And it doesn't care about his standing in the international community. Today I sat down with Steve to discuss his most recent book The Achilles Traff,

which unpacks why Saddam Hussein would sacrifice his regime over a weapons program that didn't exist, and why the US Iraq relationship, notable for Cold War air cooperation resulted in conflict decades later. Given the moment that we find ourselves in, fall of 2024, and we find ourselves with a 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”

un-earth in your research as you delved into the origins of America's invasion of Iraq. Primarily, it was to enlarge our sense of what the origins were by including Iraq's side of the story, because for one thing, 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 United States before the invasion. And what attracted me to the book was the discovery that, as it turned out, Saddam had taken according to leadership conversations as seriously as Richard Nixon, and that these takes were in the possession of the U.S. government, for the most part, some of them had been translated and released or other documents from

inside Saddam's regime that could be obtained different ways. Ultimately, I sued the Pentagon and the Food and Information Act, and got a big batch of materials, and then worked with scholars,

of these insights from inside Saddam's cabinet and inside his office and his wife,

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 and lives in expenditure, and also the enormous costs that a lot paid and lives as a nation being shattered essentially by the invasion and still working to find a workable Constitutional compact to remain in the foundation 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 for a 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 multiple 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 and maybe 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 a rock that might be useful looking forward. I think that's totally right, listening to you discuss, I think your own contribution to the Iraq War literature, you know, if 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 and accurate picture and an objective picture of him and his relationships across the world.

Yeah, it's a good question, and it took me a while to develop my own convictions that I hope

“and I'm sure that, you know, in decades to come out as scholars will go back to these materials”

and hopefully that 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 he was at 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 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 twenty 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 which he gave after the weight more when he was expelled and under international sanctions and his logic took a little while to understand

he was quite shrewd about how power worked and quite determined to preserve his own

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 who's saying 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 and particular that he did possess a shrewd political insight and that he could be a very demanding a demanding administrator of the

“states affairs I think at one point in the book you you offer readers a portrait of how he would get up”

at five 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 very deep paranoia in particular as it related to America's role in the world and and Israel's role in the world and and I'm curious how how you saw those some of those competing tensions coming together for Saddam as someone who could possess this this shrewdness

but who is also deeply deeply paranoid about the the world and his own role in it.

“That's very well said he was immersed 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 a nasserite Cairo that was a further education he became swept up in the pan error of 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 the absorb a lot of the blood libel and and other kind of familiar narratives

that the back centuries but more particularly acute in the 19th century or the 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 as you will and Iran first you know your listeners will understand that Iran is a moment with Persian society that started the population of Chia and in Iraq his Arab nationalism his form of Arab nationalism regard regarding 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 gene and he wasn't wrong just that he he overthought the problem and and and he kept extrapolating from experience into a kind of systemic worldview that didn't serve in well and it's sort of undermined his natural sort of evidence based shrewdness about his problems how to stay in power how to for decenemies it 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 as a real problem to him. Absolutely and I think listeners who may not be”

fully familiar with the the long arc of history among the United States Israel and and Iran particularly in today's world where we appear to be sort of trying to teeter backwards off the rank of a of a regional war between Israel and Iran has ball all these actors it it may be somewhat surprising for folks to even conceptualize that there was a point at which there there was some fertile cooperation between or at least in Saddam's mind between Israel and Iran and

into your point that imagination seemed to drive a lot of his world view of of and and to drive

on this in addition to some of these deeply held theories thank you also portray him

“and I used the word earlier as a bit of centric you know this is a man who I think can”

believe up to the US 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 any Saddam who's saying poetry in your in your compilation of the book or just what were some other interesting takeaways as you came to contextualized Saddam as a human with all of these odd quirks about him well you know he was a he was a peasant who up in really

hard circumstances in a really rough neighborhood he was carrying a gun on the school bus you know from ten or twelve or fifteen belong to a clan that engaged in murder he himself committed a shooting that was my described as a you know revenge justice shooting again someone who had offended some section of their family and he had very little formal education but he was the ultimate autodidac he really had an energetic desire to read and to educate himself and that led him

to a 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 celebrating him so among the works he commissioned were biographical films he bought in a guy who had directed James Bond movies to do the final cut of his own story the commissioned musical versions of his novels which were often kind of a ten set narrative of erotic nationalism

told through his leadership and an 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 we had a whole system of subsidies to writers he would hold you to provide 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 are these poems so you know i i found him forgivably full of himself in some ways because apart from the terrible violence and and horrible

costy imposed but as as a human being you know as as this biographer of style and wrote at the

“introduction to his quotes of prize-winning first-five of style and as a writer you have to understand”

evil it's 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 in the book and like a lot of people walk down pulling out old series to watch on television to pass the

time and with my wife we watched the soprano myself for the second time for the first time

when we were about four episodes into the first season is like that's saddam saddam and tony soprano have a lot in common they they have these full complicated family lives that are 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 this rule in isolation from these motivations I think from in order to do grasp what this”

is doing this maybe 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 well he he put them into every

won by the super 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 they only exceptions were a few individuals who were for example in charge of diplomacy like park as the user of the christian and didn't have a political base to threaten him he was very worried about the scenario of generals who weren't loyal to him who had possession of aircraft or tanks and who could roll against him in a coup d'état of the sort that he himself had participated in in the bath party took power so he he will he needed

his relatives but then his relatives were of uneven quality and and even though they might well be loyal although he didn't 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 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 and the notorious uday 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 he was always looking for relatives that were capable and it frustrated him that you know he had half brothers who the appointed as minister of the interior of the guy would get in his car drive around and shoot at traffic lights get

drunk and making full of himself in public which reflected poorly on sedan 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 undermined his credibility with the public 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 sedan or at least they have a quarrel that reaches violent proportions I concluded after all of this four years of research one of the big subjects in any treatment of sedan has to be the attempts to eliminate the United States tried again and again to eliminate them 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 to made attempts and failed

is real certainly would have liked to see them eliminated I'm not aware of any direct bombing attempts against him but he was afraid of them for the reason and so all these people swung in this nobody really got close the one person who almost killed him would have changed his dream was his eldest son whether it was his own son right goes up with a live AK 47 and you're so far as to shoot it off at the feet of sedan's half brother bars on outside the door

and inside the living room is sedan and if he burst into the room with that gun be 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 sedan's in a ability opportunity in ten certainly so I want to pivot here and you have mentioned how despite many efforts the CIA or at least in sedan's mind the CIA was coming after him is is real 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 signed 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 this effort at an intelligence partnership at this co-operation 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-awak Iraq war like what what were policy makers

effective so what they were trying to achieve was to prevent what more or less is 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 sedan's dictatorship so during the 1980s the same problem was on the minds of voted administration policy makers 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. Iatallah Homeini was in full power the Iranian Revolution have consolidated it had announced its international ambitions it was now involved in Lebanon and was in fact a anti-American and the Reagan administration feared that if the Iranians broke

“through and took Baghdad and overthrew and executed some of which is what Iatallah Homeini”

kept promising you would do that it could be a disaster within the larger disaster of the Middle East and so the administration secretly authorized the CIA to go to Baghdad and to avoid Saddam with satellite photographs of Iranian military positions so as to prevent the Iranian drive on Baghdad and this officer Thomas Toeton was still alive 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

book goes into this in autofocus and in any event 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 passed it before 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 it's very helpful to be able to see them really can 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 of something wrong here I first just says the pictures probably not reliable many says I'll tell you whatever they're giving to us they're also giving me the Iranians and you know a lot of his more diplomatic

gates would say well boss of course you're always right but that 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 bone headed effort to free hostages in Lebanon had cooperated with his role in providing military assistance to Iran to help each side in the war Saddam felt vindicated by that and he never forgot the betrayal he referred to it all through the 1990s

“and then we run up to the 2002 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 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 Republic and it seems like things change after the goal for both in terms of the overall US 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 the truth of his WMD program could you talk a little bit about 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 in the 2000s? 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

intrusently dropped me in some perverse world given the malign effect that Iranian influence

“has in the country to that but when Saddam invaded Kuwait of course we all remember George H. W. Bush”

organized a global coalition of 40 countries to expel the Iraqi forces from Kuwait and the store the Emirates were a family however George H. W. Bush did not believe that it made sense to drive on the Baghdad and seek Saddam so the throw despite the outrageousness of his conduct and invading him off to Kuwait and in the aftermath of the war having achieved the objective of expeling 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 was a former CIA director signed the finding

necessary to create a covert action component 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 US aircraft into a cooler temp than Baghdad it was a more indirect attempt to recognize that Saddam had an opposition on both outside the country and inside the country that many Iraqis including his own

general for disgusted by the price their country had paid for this full-conceived invasion 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 an 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 but you know notwithstanding Hollywood the CIA is not on its own capable of solving international problems that for example the US military is unable to solve or US diplomats are unable to solve that the whole of government of the United States a super power 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 good they're game that's their role they they 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 W. Bush was removed by the”

Clinton administration would advertise the potential of a silver bullet coup day taught at Benst S.Bahn and that led to some tragic failures in the field where Iraqis who collaborated with the CIA paid the ultimate prize 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 US foreign policy

that are being used to as kind of silver bullet strategies but there were there were lots of done hoe 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 up of them that they were being asked to do something that was almost performative and that was costing their rocky partners their lives

without any real prospect of success and one of them is station chief who was in demand for a while was an infancy I just you know infustration over this kind of half measure approach that they had to carry out at high cost in the rocky life so that that was this that's the sort of summary of what happened and the last chapter is by 1998 when George Tenet was promoted become deputy director and eventually director the lesson had been learned on the seventh floor at the CIA

that this this kind of wishful who's day top were not going to work and in fact then the CIA started to revise the White House around 1998 don't count on us to solve worse it on problem we tried doesn't work we've learned a painful lesson his security systems are so layered we have so

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 said after they had tried and there 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 2000 entry invasion

because when after 9/11 Bush said who will rid me of Saddam who's saying the file on Saddam included in a self-assessment by the CIA that they couldn't do the job and it was going to require the full force and the United States military 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 for a stage W Bush and then Clinton to try to forgive me have their

cake and eat it to where they 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 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 learning that sort of contemplated the larger invasion that happened in 2003 is that fair. Yes I think it is and I you know I was struck by how this happened in the 90s you know the Clinton really didn't want to have to deal with the rock but it rock kept coming into his office and you know he regarded it when he was elected is the

world he had defeated George H W Bush who he obviously respected and ended up working with a lot in his post 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 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 you rock away from

me and there was a containment policy in place that included no flies on it was expensive it involved a lot of American overflights but he was containing and gets it on 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 it couldn't get this rock problem off his desk so it was more in the mid 90s right around his reelection and 90s sixty finally said to the 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 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 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 with really a product of the Clinton administration they they embraced it under pressure from Republicans in Congress it was an easy thing to pronounce because there was no real prospect that would be carried out by U.S. military invasion at the time. All the 9/11 created those

ambitions politically but it was um 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 and the likes of Al Gore they wasn't set it at the time in support because they had already been there they had seen this as

“the only solution even before. And I think what this discussion is doing is it's it's easing”

us into sort of the final section of the title of the book right Saddam who's saying 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 who's saying 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 in which was a which was another piece of the drive towards the invasion and I'm curious just at at a high level what did you learn why why would Saddam who saying carry out this this strategy of of deception and and disruption of of the inspections

in the international community. Well he too wanted to have his cake and needed to 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 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 this was a forced disarmament and the security council was clear you're not

going to get relief from sanctions this essentially essentially a blockade of Iraq until you demonstrate that you've destroyed all of these dug-in days that you have bonished 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 you didn't want to participate in the destruction of his military

industrial complex on live television with a bunch of foreigners and white coats humiliating him by tearing down everything that he had built up during his modernization drop. Second he thought that if he actually destroyed the weapons but didn't 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 but 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 the 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 nineties that was the original sin of the confusion he did something that doesn't make sense to us he destroyed but he was asked to destroy but he didn't do it in a way that was transparent enough to convince the international community actually done it and he did it so have hazardly and he lied about it so frequently that in the end inspectors quite recently believed that he must not have actually done it why would he be lying about it we can help you or if you'll

tell us the truth maybe you will get sanctions relief he never believed that he would get sanctions

relief and it was also right about that you know in the end the Clinton administration announced that in a speech that metal in all bright gave in 1997 after being lied to you 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 us comrades you know this this carrot of sanctions relief it's the illusion

they want me gone so why should we cooperate we're not going to get anything for it and that was this 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 has a weekend 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 it

doesn't care about his standing in the international community it's interesting because to listen to that logic because it's it's it's quite twisted but if you're 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 and well let's 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 this

seems to frustrate a lot of his his designs but I think Steve your book is also a it's a story of misunderstandings on both sides right and you've covered very well how Saddam is understood

“sort of how his actions would be received in the broader community but I think there's also a”

part of your 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 could you discuss America's part in in this in this tragedy sort of in the 90s as we walk ourselves up

to this invasion in 2003. Yeah I think the first one is that we blinded ourselves and 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 into the invasion we had no back channel he wanted conversation he was that was part of his tactical strategy for living out of sanctions he wanted to be in contact he wanted to talk about areas of

mutual interests like he was opposed to Islamist terrorism on that sort of derriots head in the 90s did we want to talk about that maybe we could cooperate you know should we talk about the Israeli Palestinian peace process everybody wanted your rock just come out of the rejections camp and join Jordan and other Arab states in facilitating and Israeli Palestinian settlement would he 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 weirdness in Clinton's voice he's been through this before Blair's confunding the

problem with his inbox at the first time Clinton asked him look do you're people do they talk

to Saddam he said do you know is anybody in the foreign office talking to him and and Blair says you know I'm just here I 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've been roasted for it here in Washington because I would be seeing by the Republicans in Congress as a sign of weakness or if he's been so I can't do it and it just seems sad and

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 a nuclear program through you know the facilitator and a man in secret for years and years and years and we still don't even 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 he characterized as younger self that he was writing novels all day that he'd disappear in for long periods of time just insights what might have allowed us to steam more clearly in the in the heat after 9/11 that he wasn't the same threat that he had been in the invaded Kuwait and so deliberately shutting off contact with uh foritarians even awful ones who are enemies of the United States just seems

self-defeated that was one of the big lessons that came out of the 90s and I wonder if if you might

“touch on one of the other lessons that I think your your book illustrates well and the it particularly”

related to the role of messaging and deterrence and I'm here referencing the 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 upfront perhaps might have prevented the his invasion of Kuwait and then perhaps might have changed the the ultimate bark 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 yeah sure I mean there's a you know there's a discourse that's still with us today that there are certain leaders of certain dictatorships whose leaders are undetrurable either because they're

fire by religious zeal or because they're just crazy and I've always been skeptical of that

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 push administration failed to deter Saddam from invading Kuwait in the first place that's a

separate story it wasn't opportunity I think to deter him but it was missed after he invaded the principle 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 that did you say so George H. W. Bush sent James Baker's secretary of state to meet with Tarak Aziz Saddam's principle tipped in that and Baker carried a really hardcore deterrence message well you 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 demanded you're 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 Irva 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 Tarak Aziz heard that because 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 boarded that they not be used and not won gas shell with fire during the war so what you can I think the only reason we'll think 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 revising 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 and then to back those up when necessary I just think when the world is this dangerous having clarity about the trans messages is not something to talk yourself out of because

“it's you know it scares people or that it's complicated and domestic politics I think it's an important”

we have a clear record that it's an important part of our own security Steve just as we as we approach the end of our conversation today I I want to stick with that that 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 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/Sitampus saying and the lead up to America's invasion of Iraq and I'm curious if if you and in studying this history and 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 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 these parts of the world over the course of history yes I mean I think that we talked about some of the lessons so I don't want to repeat the way you've drawn these out and I think Frank listed them correctly from my own perspective about what's important so having contact with enemies and the rest you know we we have lived in a world of rising complexity that has unfolded while we have enjoyed a distinctive period

giant global service the way the British and the French did we have often exercised our power

“without either hit the historical knowledge of the societies that 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 counter-insurgency ambitions in our inner rock and Afghanistan where we 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 peaceful breakout 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 informed policy discourse suggests now and we don't have a long record of tying 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 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 imperial civil service so so how can we within our own names within our own democratic setup with all of the brilliant you know young people coming out of our universities and graduate schools with 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 most of these 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 have the top 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 description for failure and we've had enough failures so how do we do better we'll leave it there Steve call opera of the Achilles Trapp Saddam Hussein the CIA and the origins of America's invasion of a rock

thanks so much for coming in today thanks Preston thanks for your good questions I appreciate it the law fair podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution you can get ad free versions of this and other law fair podcasts by becoming a law fair material supporter through our website law fairmedia.org/support you'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters please rate in review us wherever you get your podcasts

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