68 MARCH 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL and understanding. The U.S. intelligence community, operating in a vacuum, could not understand Saddam’s caginess about his programs if he truly had nothing to hide and therefore concluded that he must be trying to conceal ongoing WMD programs. For his part, Saddam assumed that the CIA knew all and would certainly know that he had destroyed the entirety of his WMD in 1991, but he could not admit that truth for fear that it would expose his weakness to his mortal enemies. He concluded, therefore, that U.S. insistence that he was hiding something was simply a charade intended to justify regime change in Baghdad. But the real value of Coll’s work is gained by putting his two books side by side. Taken together, Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap bookend how two critical decisions of the Reagan administration in the 1980s—support for the jihad against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and for Saddam’s war against Iran—laid the foundation for the disasters of the 2000s that continue to complicate and confound U.S. policy in the Middle East, including the rise of Islamic extremism, 9/11, and the two forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to argue that the fears motivating the administration at the time were unfounded. In the postVietnam moment, the Soviet move into Afghanistan was seen as indicative of Moscow’s expansionist agenda that, left unchecked, would ultimately threaten vital U.S. and Western interests in the region, including secure access to energy and the stability of U.S. partners in the Gulf and Pakistan. Similarly, no matter how misguided Saddam’s decision to invade Iran, the Reagan administration believed that allowing Saddam’s defeat would embolden Iran, advance its aspirations to spearhead a regional Islamic revolution ultimately targeting Israel, and once again threaten stability and security, including vital access to energy, throughout the Middle East. Nevertheless, the question remains whether U.S. policies, no matter how justifiable in the short term, reflected a larger understanding of the region or were constructed to advance enduring U.S. interests, including promoting more open, tolerant societies better able to resist the forces that have threatened the region and U.S. interests ever since. As the principal officer in Peshawar in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, I witnessed the impact of the rapid loss of U.S. interest in Afghanistan, the marginalization of Western-oriented, prodemocracy Afghan forces, and the rise of the most extreme elements of the Afghan resistance groups, often under the tutelage of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) operatives. Meantime, as Coll describes the period following the Iran-Iraq War, the U.S. and the West were determined to pursue potentially lucrative projects with the Iraqi regime while sidestepping the consequences of Saddam’s brutal oppression of the Iraqi people, exemplified by the use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in Halabja and elsewhere. But, as Coll notes, “the plan to coax Saddam toward moderation suffered from a void of access and understanding.” That lack of understanding, which was mutual, eventually led Saddam to conclude that the U.S. would not intercede to prevent his invasion of Kuwait, and the rest, as they say, is history. BOOKS Anatomy of a Pyrrhic Victory The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq Steve Coll, Penguin, 2024, $35.00/ hardcover, e-book available, 576 pages. Reviewed by Gerald Feierstein Steve Coll, the award-winning journalist, professor, and author, has often turned his journalistic fine eye to the backstory of American foreign policy debacles over the past nearly half a century. In his previous works, Ghost Wars and Directorate S, Coll drew on his deep experience in South Asia (as Washington Post South Asia bureau chief based in New Delhi from 1989 to 1995) to report on the U.S. entanglement with Afghanistan and Pakistan in both the pre- and post-9/11 eras. In his latest work, The Achilles Trap, Coll turns his microscope on the U.S. and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq up to the moment of the 2003 U.S. invasion. Utilizing Iraqi sources and documents for the first time, Coll weaves together the complex picture of the rise of the sociopathic Saddam Hussein and his thuggish family and friends, the origins and the demise of his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, and his fatal entanglement with the United States driven primarily by mutual antipathy to the Islamic Republic of Iran. At the heart of his report, Coll seeks to answer what has mystified analysts for 20 years: If Saddam Hussein were not in possession of weapons of mass destruction, why did he not allow inspectors to establish that fact, thereby saving his regime and, ultimately, his life? Thus, the Achilles trap. Both the Americans and Saddam fell victim to their own weaknesses of analysis
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