The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq

by Steve Coll

One after another, three American presidents—George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—signed Top Secret “findings” directing the C.I.A. to overthrow Saddam. This campaign to foster a coup d’état in Baghdad, which lasted from May 1991 until the 2003 invasion, proved to be spectacularly unsuccessful.

the C.I.A.’s record in Iraq after 1991 was mostly one of operational and analytical calamities. This is not just an outsider’s hindsight verdict. Inside the C.I.A. during the late 1990s, the Iraq Operations Group was known sardonically as “the House of Broken Toys.”

In neighboring Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini had announced a militant revolution in the name of Shia Islam. Khomeini despised Saddam Hussein. (Saddam and many Baath Party leaders were Sunni, the most prevalent branch of Islam worldwide but a minority within Iraq.) Khomeini predicted “that pig” in Baghdad would fall within six months because of a “revolution like ours.” An underground Shiite movement in Iraq, the Islamic Dawa Party, energized by Khomeini, had opened an office in Tehran and was planning assassination attempts against Baath Party leaders. Saddam’s intelligence services were on high alert for spies and terrorists inspired by Khomeini.

The Reagan administration had marked its course: by mid-1983, it had shifted from a panicked effort to stave off an Iranian takeover of Iraq to an acceptance of Saddam as a prospective partner in America’s strategy for the Middle East. It was a decision that would have deep and unforeseen consequences for the U.S., Iraq, and Iran. Washington had now lashed itself to a dictator whose economic ambitions and ruthless “dark side” were easy enough to grasp.

On July 17, 1979, the eleventh anniversary of the revolution, Bakr resigned. On that day, Saddam Hussein, at the age of forty-two, became Iraq’s president, the unchallenged ruler of a nation possessed of vast oil riches and a large, well-equipped standing army. It was widely assumed that Saddam had strong-armed Bakr into retirement. Some form of putsch clearly occurred, but exactly what happened remains opaque. Bakr was an aging leader and had health problems.

Between 1984 and 1988, the United States not only accepted but also effectively collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iran by sharing intelligence about Iranian positions. All the while, Washington continued to insist, in public, that it condemned chemical-weapon use by any and all.

In early November 1986, a Lebanese magazine published a jaw-dropping story reporting that the Reagan administration had been secretly selling weapons to Khomeini’s Iran, in collaboration with Israel, apparently to secure the release of American hostages held by Iranian proxies in Lebanon. Then, on the evening of November 25, in Washington, D.C., Attorney General Edwin Meese delivered the shocking admission that not only was the magazine story essentially true, but in a bizarre twist, the White House had also used profits from arms sales to Khomeini’s regime to funnel money to anti-government Nicaraguan rebels known as the Contras, in apparent violation of U.S. law.

Iran-Contra Affair

The scandal soon to be known as Iran-Contra—a covert initiative run from the Reagan White House that would result in criminal convictions of eleven administration officials—had been born. The two-line banner across the top of The New York Times’ front page on the morning after Meese’s announcement—“Iran Payment Found Diverted to Contras; Reagan Security Adviser and Aide Are Out”—reflected the political thunderbolt that had just hit Washington. Iran-Contra would consume journalists and congressional investigators for years.

The decision to provide arms to Khomeini had originated around 1984, when some of Reagan’s National Security Council aides began to think that the U.S. could not afford to be entirely estranged from Iran, a key ally prior to Khomeini’s revolution. In late 1984, two years into the C.I.A.’s secret intelligence-sharing relationship with Saddam, an interagency review concluded that the Reagan administration had “no influential contacts” in Iran whatsoever. The review’s authors worried this might create an opening for Soviet influence. This was arguably an irrational anxiety, but it was typical of the Cold War’s zero-sum calculations. Moreover, during 1984 and 1985, Iranian allies in Lebanon had kidnapped C.I.A. station chief William Buckley, Presbyterian minister Benjamin Weir, and Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, among others; the White House had no credible channel to negotiate with Tehran to pursue their release. Israel, meanwhile, for its own reasons, supplied arms to Iran and maintained contacts in Tehran. Iran was hostile to some of Israel’s Arab enemies, including Iraq. Iran also had a sizable Jewish population that Israel sought to protect.

For Saddam, battlefield momentum seemed to breed greater aggression. More than ever before, he now embraced gas as a winning weapon. According to Iraq’s accounting, its military fired 54,000 chemically armed artillery shells, launched 27,000 short-range rockets, and dropped 19,500 aerial gas bombs during the war. Nearly two-thirds of these chemical weapons were used during 1987 and 1988, when the D.I.A.’s intelligence sharing under Druid Leader was taking place.[15]

Scholars and researchers estimate that Saddam Hussein’s regime killed at least 50,000 people during the Anfal, between February and September; Kurdish authorities place the death toll at 182,000. Most of the victims were military-age men, but many women, children, and older civilians were also executed and buried in mass graves, as the Kurdish researcher Choman Hardi has documented. The Iraqi Army destroyed more than 2,600 villages.

To Saddam, the summer of 1988 seemed a season of great victory. On July 20, Ayatollah Khomeini, who was nearing his eighty-sixth birthday and in failing health, at last capitulated and announced a cease-fire, a decision that effectively ended the Iran-Iraq War. It was the outcome Saddam had long sought—an armistice and a return to prewar borders.

The Iraqi leader had needlessly started one of the most costly and aimless wars in recent world history and, after eight terrible years, had ended up where he started. His nation had suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, inflicted a comparable number on Iran, and spent more than $500 billion. When the war began, Iraq had at least $35 billion in foreign exchange reserves; when it ended, the country owed more than $80 billion—about twice the size of its economy— to various lenders, including Japan, France, West Germany, America, and the Soviet Union. Its two largest creditors were Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Iraq owed them as much as $35 billion and $10 billion, respectively. Yet Saddam had no choice but to declare this fiasco another win in his series of glorious triumphs; to do otherwise would be to admit weakness and invite more attempts to overthrow him.

On November 8, 1988, George H. W. Bush had been elected president of the United States. He was arguably the best-prepared foreign-policy president since Dwight Eisenhower. A former C.I.A. director and U.N. ambassador, he had spent eight years as vice president watching Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy up close. As he moved into the Oval Office, Bush assembled a team of foreign-policy pragmatists led by National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, a retired U.S. Air Force general. Bush and Scowcroft were both inclined to continue the Reagan administration’s support of Iraq.

The Cold War’s end—a destabilizing inflection point in many parts of the world—would provide a backdrop during the next nine months for Saddam’s stunning transformation from tenuous American ally to mortal enemy.

During the nineteenth century, before the age of oil, the emirate was poor and of little interest to world powers; it occupied a fragile place between the British and Ottoman Empires. It had not been administered by the Ottomans and eventually became a British protectorate. After oil was found, successive Iraqi leaders laid claims to Kuwaiti territory near their shared border, and they occasionally declared with scant historical backing that all of Kuwait belonged to Iraq. In 1961, Britain granted independence to Kuwait. The Iraqi strongman Abd al-Karim Qasim threatened a takeover, but he backed off after Britain deployed warships and marines. Iraq’s claims about Kuwait had festered ever since.

Iraq and Kuwait possessed similarly prodigious amounts of oil—each country’s holdings were estimated at the time at about one hundred billion barrels. Yet Iraq’s population was eighteen million, while Kuwait’s native subjects numbered only about seven hundred thousand, so the Kuwaitis enjoyed much greater wealth per person.

During the first six months of 1990, world oil prices fell by about a quarter, from twenty-two dollars a barrel to less than seventeen dollars, crippling all of the Middle East’s oil-dependent governments. Kuwait and other producers pumped out more oil to make up for the lost revenue per barrel, but this additional supply put further downward pressure on prices. In public, Saddam now regularly accused both Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates of conspiring against Iraq through their overproduction of oil.

Kuwait had little practical way to stop an Iraqi invasion. The flat, sandy, 150-mile border was open and barely defended. Kuwait’s military forces numbered twenty thousand, while Iraq’s approached one million.

In the cascade of errors that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration’s failure to deter Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait—as well as Saddam’s failure to grasp what would happen after he acted—stand out. Saddam’s invasion drew the U.S. into a major war to liberate Kuwait, followed by a succession of limited wars and C.I.A. covert actions against Saddam, ultimately culminating with George W. Bush’s fateful decision to invade.

So why did the Bush administration fail to signal harsh consequences to Saddam if he tried to take Kuwait, and why did Saddam fail to anticipate the American-led war of liberation that would follow? In Washington, the main problem was that the Bush administration remained committed to improving relations with Baghdad, hoping against hope. In pursuit of this policy, Presidents Reagan and Bush pulled their punches when Saddam gassed his enemies. Saddam saw what he could get away with, and this surely influenced his calculations about Kuwait in 1990.

Saddam was encouraged in his Kuwait adventure by our tolerance for just about everything he did, including his use of chemical weapons.”[50]

the larger problem was woefully familiar: “Governments have a hard time coming to terms with failed policies,” recalled David George Newton, the former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, referring to the long Reagan-Bush tilt toward Saddam. “They will do almost anything to convince themselves that by tinkering with the old policy, they will be just fine. I think this comes from not wanting to admit you’ve been wrong.”[51]

Nearly forty countries would join the U.S.-led effort to oust Iraq from Kuwait. Such a coalition might never have formed but for the Cold War’s expiry, coupled with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s willingness to experiment with a “new world order.”

Saddam tended to think that the C.I.A. was omniscient, that it knew Iraq’s important secrets. Surely, therefore, the U.S. knew about his clandestine plan to occupy Kuwait. In any event, by mid-July, Saddam was no longer hiding his preparations. Yet Bush still wrote him friendly notes, and the president’s envoys delivered no direct or forceful warning against an attack. In Saddam’s way of thinking, this meant that Bush might want him to take Kuwait. Years later, in captivity, Saddam asked U.S. investigators: “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?”[52]

A decade later, after 9/11, the question of whether Bush stopped too soon and missed an opportunity to drive on to Baghdad to depose Saddam informed his son’s decision to invade Iraq. At the time, however, the matter was not seriously debated, and there was no dissent in Bush’s war cabinet, not even from the future Iraq hawk Dick Cheney. Occupying Baghdad would far exceed the war’s U.N. mandate and would undermine the realpolitik agreements that undergirded the U.S.-led coalition. It would deprive America of the chance to break free from Vietnam’s legacy with a clear, decisive victory.

The decision to secretly destroy large sections of Iraq’s WMD stocks and infrastructure without keeping good records would prove to be one of the most fateful events in Saddam’s—and America’s—march toward disaster. It meant that even when Iraq later sought to be honest about what had been destroyed in the summer of 1991, its officials would struggle to persuade U.N. inspectors. Not even the programs’ secret leaders knew fully what had been done. “We didn’t know what was destroyed and what was not,” Jafar recalled. “It was all a big mess.”[10]

The struggle between the C.I.A. and the U.N. for control of inspection operations that began in the summer of 1991 would shape and distort the effort to verifiably disarm Iraq for years to come.[19]

The standard elements included clandestine funding of anti-regime radio broadcasts; perhaps some deception operations designed to confuse the targeted dictator about whom he could trust; and inevitably, the organization and funding of exiled political groups, seemingly no matter how fractious or disconnected from their home countries these exiles might be.

he watched the size of Iraq’s economy shrink from $180 billion in 1990 to about $13 billion at the end of 1995, crushed by sanctions and weak oil prices.[5]

Per capita Iraqi incomes had fallen from about $4,200 dollars in 1979 to just $485 in 1993, it reported. During the four years after 1989, rates of infant mortality rose from twenty-five deaths per thousand births to ninety-three per thousand.

And the economy’s collapse had led to social breakdown, the unpublished Baath Party study found: there was a nationwide rise in murder, kidnapping, forgery, divorce, unemployment, children begging on the streets, and, for many people, “feelings of fear and stress.”

by making plain that there was really no way out of sanctions, Albright clarified Saddam’s choice and spurred him to act belligerently.

Just as “confirmation bias” misled America, it caused Saddam to misread Washington’s claims about his WMD. He assumed that an all-powerful C.I.A. already knew that he had no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. A C.I.A. capable of getting such a big question dead wrong on the facts was not consistent with Saddam’s bedrock assumptions. Since America knew the truth but nonetheless faked claims that he was still hiding illicit arms, he reasoned, what did this imply? It meant that the Zionists and spies lined up against him were using the WMD issue cynically to advance their conspiracy to oust him from power. He saw no reason to play their game or deal with their prying inspectors.

By a certain logic, Clinton had two options. He could continue to slow-roll regime change, effectively allowing Saddam to remain in power, pinched by sanctions but no longer subject to weapons inspections. Or he could overthrow him by a full-on, Desert Storm–scale American military invasion. Yet the idea of an invasion was a nonstarter at the time, even among Republican hawks in Congress. Nothing about Saddam seemed to require such a costly, tumultuous project in 1999 or 2000. The American economy was booming; American global military power was unchallenged.

(Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers responsible for the September 11 attacks came from Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally. The others were from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon—also all U.S. allies. No Iraqis were involved.)

Saddam had no apparent sense of his vulnerability to false accusations about his own responsibility for the attacks. He took no steps to assuage the Bush administration or American public opinion or to create any record of public statements that might get him off the hook—as he had done quickly and even obsequiously in 1987 after an Iraqi jet struck the U.S.S. Stark. Saddam had never met Osama bin Laden and considered him “no different than the many zealots that came before him.” Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 plot, as the C.I.A. quickly concluded after the attacks, and as subsequent investigations have made indisputable. But Saddam did not explicitly distance himself from al-Qaeda or bin Laden. He initially seemed uncertain about whether to believe America’s claim that bin Laden was responsible. More importantly, the September 11 attacks realized a scenario that Saddam had talked about with visitors for years—suicide bombers on American soil, and payback for the humiliation of Iraqis and Palestinians. Saddam identified with the attackers—their strike was like his own bold decision to launch Scud missiles against Israeli cities in 1991.[6]

He had nothing to do with the attacks, but he empathized with tbe attackers.

George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., and General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, laid out plans to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Nobody at the meeting doubted that al-Qaeda had carried out the hijackings, but Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted, without providing evidence, that there was at least a 10 percent chance, and perhaps a 50 percent chance, that Saddam Hussein had also been involved. The plans proposed by the C.I.A. and the Pentagon to strike al-Qaeda were too narrow: “We really need to think broader,” Wolfowitz said. “We’ve got to make sure we go ahead and get Saddam out at the same time—it’s a perfect opportunity.” Bush eventually blew up, according to Shelton. “How many times do I have to tell you we are not going after Iraq right this minute?”

Yet Bush privately made clear to close allies and his cabinet that he thought Wolfowitz was likely right, just premature. “I believe Iraq was involved,” he said at a White House meeting on September 17. “But I’m not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” Around the same time, he told Tony Blair, “When we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.”[10]

Bush and many others in his war cabinet—including Cheney and the C.I.A.’s George Tenet—assumed reasonably that al-Qaeda must be planning follow-on attacks. When evidence surfaced that autumn that bin Laden had met with Pakistani nuclear scientists in Afghanistan, they even worried that al-Qaeda might have the capacity to pull off an atomic strike. “I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists,” Bush wrote later.[12]

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan collapsed in late November, defeated by American-led bombing and Afghan opposition forces armed and funded by the C.I.A. In early December, Osama bin Laden escaped and disappeared, presumably into Pakistan.

Late in the Afghanistan War, George W. Bush again asked Donald Rumsfeld about plans to invade Iraq. As Michael Morell, the C.I.A. officer who met with Bush every morning to present classified intelligence briefings, later wrote: “The president’s thinking on Iraq was motivated by the soul-crushing impact of 9/11 and the legitimate fear that as bad as 9/11 had been, things could be much worse—if Saddam got it into his head to either use his weapons of mass destruction as a terrorist tool against the West, or provide those weapons to an international terrorist group.” These dire scenarios were “unlikely,” U.S. intelligence analysts believed, yet Bush concluded that they were “risks he could not ignore.”[27]

published poll revealed that three-quarters of Americans thought Saddam had aided al-Qaeda. Roughly the same number supported attacking Baghdad.[31]

Feb 2002

President Bush repeatedly cited the danger that Saddam might pass WMD to terrorists as the reason why it was no longer acceptable to merely contain him.

On October 10 and 11, Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize force against Iraq, by 296–133 in the House and 77–23 in the Senate. Bush was now politically fortified to wage war.

The invasion and occupation plan that Bush had developed violated Powell’s storied principles for successful military action: there was no clear exit. If Powell had resigned that winter, as the journalist Robert Draper has written, he might have touched off a chain of political events that could have disrupted the momentum for war and perhaps even stopped it. But “loyalty is a trait that I value,” Powell explained later.

The Bush administration’s plan was riddled with bad assumptions, but one of the largest blind spots involved Iran. Even though Tehran’s ayatollahs had been seeking Saddam’s overthrow for more than two decades, the president and his advisers failed to think through how Iran would exploit this outcome. For its part, the C.I.A. had never prepared to challenge the ambitious plans of Iran’s security services to influence post-Saddam politics and to oppose an American occupation. The agency had been directed away from postwar planning and the focus was on the conventional war that was about to erupt.

Apart from Kuwait, Iraq’s Arab neighbors did not want America to invade. They feared (with reason) that Saddam’s overthrow would destabilize the region and empower Iran, which in turn might inflame Shiite minority populations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Turkey did not want a war, either, fearing (also with reason) that America’s intervention would further empower independence-minded Kurds, including violent separatists inside Turkey.

Between 2003 and 2023, about two hundred thousand civilians—nearly all Iraqi—died in the multisided violence and civil conflicts that followed the invasion. More than forty-four hundred American soldiers, Marines, and airmen died in combat in Iraq, along with several thousand contractors, and more than thirty thousand were wounded.

The invasion and occupation relieved Iraq of Saddam’s tyranny and empowered Kurds and the country’s long-suppressed Shia majority, but it also further fragmented the Iraqi state, invited Iranian interference, strengthened al-Qaeda for a time, and contributed to the birth of the Islamic State,