How Iraq Happened

Sometimes foreign policy lies downstream from technology. When navies ran on wind, the lumber that could produce sailing ships was a prized natural resource. The arrival of steam power turned mines and coaling stations into crucial strategic assets. Then the switch from steam to oil made petroleum deposits treasures beyond measure.

The oil riches of the Middle East were first discovered in 1908, and soon the region was essential to the global economy. At first, order in the area was maintained by the United Kingdom, the dominant colonial power, but in the decades after World War II, the United States took over the role. In the 1970s, Washington tried farming out the job of regional security to local contractors, relying on Iran and Saudi Arabia to keep oil supplies flowing. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution flipped Tehran from friend to enemy, however, Washington put its hopes in a balance of power, manipulating aid to both Iraq and Iran during their brutal war to prevent either country from dominating the Persian Gulf. But this strategy collapsed in 1990, when Iraq seized Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia.

At this point, the George H. W. Bush administration stepped in to manage the situation directly, leading an international coalition to reverse Iraq’s aggression and restore Kuwait’s sovereignty. But Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, managed to survive the war and regain control of most of his country. So the administration backed into a policy of sanctions and containment, which its successors continued for a decade.

Then came the 9/11 attacks. In their wake, the George W. Bush administration decided to solve not only the terrorism problem but the Iraq one as well, choosing to conquer the country and forcibly eliminate Saddam’s regime. The conquering part went largely as planned, but the aftermath proved chaotic. Liberation turned into occupation; local uncertainty turned into insurgency and then civil war. U.S. troops ended up staying in Iraq and fighting one foe or another there for almost two decades.

So disastrous was the Iraq war, in fact, so costly and unforced an error, that in retrospect it seems the hinge of the entire post–Cold War era, the moment when American hegemony switched from successful to problematic, welcomed to resisted. Two decades on, the unipolar moment has faded, along with dreams of a better Middle East and American appetite for active international engagement. What remains is the puzzle of how such an epically self-destructive fiasco could have happened in the first place.

When prewar claims about the state of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs turned out not to be true, many came to believe some other agenda had driven Washington’s actions—familial revenge, say, or ideological zeal, or a desire to profit from Iraqi resources. Recent historiography has debunked those theories, showing that Bush administration officials really did think containment was falling apart and really did fear what Iraq might do afterward. What they did not know and would not have believed—because nobody would have—was the truth. Saddam’s regime had destroyed almost all its WMD programs in the early 1990s but continued for a decade longer to give every indication of having kept much of them, immolating itself in the process.

This is the strange tale told by the journalist Steve Coll in The Achilles Trap, a history of Saddam’s unconventional weapons programs and American attempts to end them. Based largely on captured Iraqi records and interviews with former officials, the book is clear, readable, and meticulous, and it does a good job of presenting the view from Baghdad—not only documenting what happened but also helping explain the seemingly inexplicable. Saddam’s behavior after the Gulf War was dangerously provocative and irrational. After 9/11, a traumatized new administration in Washington brought its own psychological issues to the table. And in 2003, their mutual misunderstandings spiraled down into catastrophe. The Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu wrote of the crucial need for strategists to “know the enemy and know yourself.” The Iraq war shows what happens when neither side knows either.

RASHOMON IN THE DESERT

Coll presents a lively narrative packed with eye-catching details. Readers learn, for example, that Khairallah Tulfah—Saddam’s uncle and mentor—summarized the family philosophy in a work titled Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies. Saddam himself was a hit man in his 20s and a prolific novelist in his 60s. He thought people’s loyalty could be judged by eavesdropping on their children and checking where his picture was displayed in their homes. His sons, Uday and Qusay, were monsters, and his son-in-law Hussein Kamel bragged that he had forced one disgraced subordinate to drink gasoline and then shot him in the stomach to see whether he would explode.

Many of Coll’s stories illustrate important truths about national political cultures. In the 1990s, Saddam bribed Russian, French, Chinese, and UN officials to gain their support, and his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, could not understand why the UN’s chief weapons inspector, the Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, would not get with the program. “We could open an account in Switzerland for you—for instance, five hundred thousand dollars,” Aziz told Ekeus. (That’s not how things were done in Sweden, Ekeus replied.) One Iraqi biological weapons program started as a unit assigned to protect Saddam from being poisoned, something Aziz considered entirely normal. “You know as well as I do,” he told a UN inspector, “that every government in the world has a section of their state security organization devoted to the testing of the food of the leadership.”

American officials, meanwhile, repeatedly came up with hare-brained secret interventions that rarely achieved anything worthwhile, with their typical course summed up by the plaque one intelligence officer had on his wall listing “The Six Phases of a CIA Covert Action Program”: “euphoria, confusion, disillusionment, search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent, distinction for the uninvolved.”

The result was a dialogue of the deaf, with little comprehension of either side by the other. In the 1980s, for example, the Reagan administration provided extensive military support to the Iraqi government to help it hold its own in the Iran-Iraq War, even as Baghdad gassed tens of thousands of its own people. But at the same time, the administration worked with Israel to provide military support to Iran in hopes of gaining the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon, using the proceeds of the arms sales to support anticommunist rebels in Nicaragua. When this intrigue came to light, Saddam was bitter but not surprised, telling his team that the Iran-contra affair was an Israeli-sponsored conspiracy to destroy him. “I mean, Zionism—come on, comrades—do I have to repeat that every time?”

Coll observes that “what many Americans understood as staggering incompetence in their nation’s foreign policy, Saddam interpreted as manipulative genius.” Similar screwups would occur again and again over the years, with each side perennially overinterpreting the other’s behavior while explaining away its own. You could write an entire textbook on the fundamental attribution error from this case alone.

THE MISSING WEAPONS

The Achilles Trap spends a lot of time on covert operations but little on the debates that went on inside each administration over how to handle Iraq. The author’s own views emerge in occasional speculation that more sincere American attempts at direct dialogue might have eased tensions, but such hopes are belied by the story of invincible ignorance he tells so well. Saddam emerges from this book as a paranoid, self-deluded megalomaniac, someone almost impossible to deal with constructively. Ekeus put the problem squarely: “Saddam Hussein has a very limited point of view. He deals largely with a small set of people, virtually all Iraqis.” His thinking, Ekeus added, was “bizarre and screwed up.”

These traits emerged in the actions the Iraqi government took during the 1990s, which are even more astonishing now that the full story is known. Having largely reconstituted his domestic position following the Gulf War, Saddam had no regrets about anything and was determined to wait out his enemies, regain his military strength and full freedom of action, and continue taking on the world. He recognized that being caught with WMD would be problematic, and so in mid-1991, he got rid of most of his programs—but without telling anybody about it or keeping records of what had been done. “We didn’t know what was destroyed and what was not,” the leader of the Iraqi nuclear program later said. “It was all a big mess.”

Having thus guaranteed utter confusion, and while continuing to deny any charges against him that had not already been proved, Saddam then acted as if everybody should have understood what had happened. In Coll’s words:

He assumed that an all-powerful C.I.A. already knew that he had no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. . . . 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.

Yet Coll shows that even high-ranking Iraqi officials were unsure about the state of their country’s WMD programs. At one meeting before the invasion in 2003, for example, Ali Hassan al-Majid—the notorious “Chemical Ali” who oversaw the gassing of Iraq’s Kurds in the 1980s—asked bluntly, “Do we have WMD?” “Don’t you know?” Saddam asked in reply. “No,” said Ali. “No,” Saddam told him. But even then, in the face of an impending American attack predicated on the existence of such weapons, the Iraqis inexplicably made no real attempt to come clean.

FROM CONTAINMENT TO ROLLBACK

It would be easy to read Coll’s book as support for the argument that the cause of the Iraq war was the rising threat Saddam seemed to pose and the fear that this instilled in Washington. The Achilles Trap paints the Iraqi leader as an unrepentant serial aggressor determined to rebuild his military power. Several of those in the West who advocated for lifting sanctions, meanwhile, were on his payroll, making their arguments suspect. Even without the faked evidence peddled by charlatans such as the Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, there were ample grounds for believing that someday Saddam would once again plunge his strategically critical region into conflict.

And yet all this had been true for years, so it cannot explain why early in the new century, the United States decided to change course and deal with the threat through preventive war. Nor did 9/11 have to lead to such an outcome, since what happened that day had nothing to do with Iraq. What produced the war was the underlying challenge of maintaining Gulf security, combined with Saddam’s bizarre behavior, combined with the psychological impact of 9/11 on a handful of idiosyncratic, unconstrained American officials.

Had Al Gore won the U.S. presidency in 2000 instead of George W. Bush, there might well have been another war between the United States and Iraq, given Saddam’s regional ambitions and the United States’ determination to thwart them. But it would have been a replay of the Gulf War, with Saddam doing something outrageous and Gore mobilizing a coalition to respond. The Clinton administration did not like the messy containment policy it inherited from its predecessor, but it could never find a better alternative. As vice president, Gore was on the hawkish side of the Clinton administration’s Iraq debates, but he never came close to advocating an unprovoked invasion, and there is no reason to think he would ever have launched one as president.

Iraq was strong enough to pose a threat but weak enough to be conquerable.

A similar scenario would have played out had George W. Bush appointed different Republican national security grandees to key positions in his administration, such as Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates instead of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, or had chosen to empower different ones among those he did appoint, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell. Yet even with Bush elected and his administration stocked with hard-liners, there was no move to attack until 9/11, which ended up setting the administration on a path to war not just in Afghanistan but in Iraq as well.

During the Clinton administration, independent radical Islamist terrorist groups had emerged as an increasingly worrisome threat. They bombed the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, and the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. During the presidential transition, outgoing Clinton officials told their incoming Bush counterparts that such groups constituted the most urgent threat the country faced, but the Bush team discounted such warnings—along with those of its own, increasingly frantic intelligence officials—because it believed that rogue states posed much greater dangers.

When al Qaeda struck New York and Washington on 9/11, therefore, the administration’s senior figures were devastated by grief, anger, and guilt. “I was not on point,” Bush said. “We missed it,” Cheney agreed. Still, truly accepting responsibility was too much to bear. That would have meant confronting the uncomfortable fact that others had not missed it and should now be listened to rather than ignored. To escape the humiliation of deferring to their critics and the cognitive dissonance produced by seeing themselves as incompetent failures, Bush and his senior advisers reframed the situation. Rather than trying to learn why they had been wrong about this attack, they looked for future ones they could prevent and in so doing recast themselves as prescient heroes. “Your response isn’t to go back and beat yourself up about 9/11,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice would put it. “It’s to try to never let it happen again.”

From this perspective, Iraq represented not only a danger but also an opportunity. The country was strong enough to pose a threat but weak enough to be conquerable, and if not involved in 9/11, then at least plausibly imaginable as the source of materiel for another mass-casualty attack. Toppling Saddam would remove the threat, make a statement, and settle old business all at once. Two weeks after the catastrophe, accordingly, Bush asked Rumsfeld to review war planning for Iraq. By the end of 2001, Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. military’s Central Command, had delivered a blueprint for an invasion. And by mid-2002, Bush had decided to strike unless Saddam indisputably confirmed his disarmament.

TO BAGHDAD AND BEYOND

Other administrations had dreamed of being rid of Saddam, but none had gone to war for it, because none wanted the responsibility of managing his country afterward. As Cheney said in 1994, in defense of the U.S. decision to not topple Saddam during the Gulf War, “Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? . . . It’s a quagmire.” The George W. Bush administration got around that problem by ignoring it. Its war plan lacked an ending—and so, unsurprisingly, the war never really ended, with the conflict lurching from one battle to another for years to come.

It is now clear that several people were responsible for that glaring omission. A weak national security adviser didn’t coordinate administration policy. A rogue secretary of defense demanded control over postwar planning, got it, and then didn’t do any worthy of the name. An overmatched theater commander never thought beyond the operational level of war. But the buck has to stop at the incurious commander in chief, who didn’t think through the foreseeable consequences of the decisions he was making.

Last year, in his book Confronting Saddam Hussein, the diplomatic historian Melvyn Leffler went over ground similar to Coll’s, giving the view from Washington and defending the Bush administration from its conspiracy-minded critics. But even he offered a damning indictment. “Bush disliked heated arguments, and, therefore, did not invite systematic scrutiny of the policies he was inclined to pursue,” Leffler wrote, adding “He was unable to grasp the magnitude of the enterprise he was embracing, the risks that inhered in it, and the costs that would be incurred.”

Why an entire government full of officials who knew better meekly executed an obviously bad plan is a separate question. When that kind of thing happens in dictatorships like Saddam’s Iraq or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, observers naturally assume it is because of the terrible costs of dissent. The American invasion of Iraq shows that no such coercion is necessary; bureaucratic deference to authority and routine careerism can keep people in line just fine.

Two sets of lessons emerge from this sorry spectacle, one about process and the other about policy. These days, well-run organizations understand how psychology can affect performance, and they try to keep their personnel grounded, self-aware, and mindful. The New York Yankees, for example, employ behavioral scientists in the front office and station a staff psychologist in the locker room, who is the first person every player sees on entering and the last on leaving. The White House Situation Room could do something similar, in hopes of improving debate there, by removing the participants’ cognitive and emotional blinders.

There should actually be debates there, moreover, with senior officials freely discussing the relative merits of multiple policy alternatives. One of the most telling facts about the decision to go to war in Iraq is the lack of any meeting where such a decision was made. At no time did the administration force itself to officially state the war’s objectives and the strategy for achieving them—a failure that allowed the huge gaps in its planning to remain unnoticed and unchallenged. Good process does not necessarily lead to good policies, but it can help weed out obviously bad ones, which is something.

Even Zen masters following best management practices, however, would have found it challenging to deal with Saddam. The Hussein family named one of its secret investment vehicles Montana Management, allegedly as a tribute to the antihero of the 1983 movie Scarface. Like Al Pacino’s self-destructive character, Saddam and his sons were destined to meet violent ends; the only question was when and how. In December 2003, Saddam was captured in a hole on a farm near Tikrit, and he died on a scaffold three years later. Uday and Qusay had been tracked down in Mosul in July 2003, turned in by the owner of their hideout for a $30 million reward. U.S. troops surrounded the villa and ordered the inhabitants to surrender. Shots from inside wounded four soldiers, precipitating a three-hour firefight involving grenades, heavy machine guns, and helicopter-fired rockets. Finally, a barrage of antitank missiles destroyed the strong room in which the former future rulers of Iraq were barricaded. It was not recorded whether they shouted, “Say hello to my little friend.”

President Bill Clinton once told his staff that he found Iraq “the most difficult of problems because it is devoid of a sensible policy response.” Once Saddam survived the Gulf War, it was reasonable for the United States to try to contain him without getting sucked into another full-scale conflict. But that approach was costly, risky, and hard to sustain. The George W. Bush administration refused to accept that such an unsatisfying course was the least bad option available and blindly plunged into the abyss. Had leaders in either Baghdad or Washington behaved less recklessly, the war would not have happened. But the challenge of protecting the global economy from Baghdad’s own Tony Montana would have remained.