Reading Saddam to Understand Iran

The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein used to tell his ministers: "Do not worry about the Iranians." Every time one of them expressed concern that Iran would obtain nuclear or chemical weapons, he was quick to reassure them, claiming that "if they ever obtain weapons of mass destruction, the Americans and the Israelis will destroy them."

How do we know this? "Saddam had a habit of recording himself with a meticulousness that did not fall short of Richard Nixon's," explains American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll. "The reason for this was partly propaganda. He had a team of media personnel and translators who took his monologues in the cabinet and turned them into the lead story on the evening news. The recordings were a way to ensure there was no gap between what he said and the propaganda they published — which could have been dangerous. But in my opinion, the recordings were also intended to hold cabinet members and other people accountable and to intimidate them, so they would not say anything that could lead to their imprisonment or worse."

During the Second Gulf War, the American military found in Iraq recordings of hundreds of hours from Hussein's leadership meetings. The Pentagon released them to the public, and then pulled them back. In response, Coll sued the Pentagon and gained access to some of them. For four years, he dove into this vast archival treasure, interviewed Iraqi officials who survived the dictatorship, and published his findings and conclusions in the acclaimed book "Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Roots of America's Invasion of Iraq" (Penguin Press, 2024).

The New York Times praised the book, calling it "excellent... a more intimate picture than ever of the dictator's thinking on global politics, local power, and his relations with the United States." Coll even won the Arthur Ross Award for it from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

"The book's title was born out of the recurring documentation on both sides of the use of the Achilles myth," says Coll. "Both sides believed the other had a fatal weak point. The Americans thought a sophisticated enough coup could solve their Iraqi problem — and 'Achilles' was even the code name for the CIA's secret coup plan in the nineties." While Hussein assumed the Americans would not be dragged into prolonged wars because they are unable to absorb human casualties and "are not immune to fatigue, frustration, and hesitation," as he said in a 1990 speech.

"My goal in the book was to expand our understanding of what really caused the Second Gulf War," explains Coll. But the message that emerges from the book is much broader and deeper than that campaign — it is an instructive lesson on the dangers of a lack of communication, on what happens when one refuses to communicate with enemies (but also with partners), and instead takes dangerous moves based on unfounded assessments and prejudices.

"It is impossible to reduce Saddam to one simple explanation," writes Coll in the book. "One after another, American presidents judged him incorrectly. They saw him as a cardboard tyrant, similar to Adolf Hitler as played by Charlie Chaplin in the film 'The Great Dictator'." How did this affect the attitude towards him? "Saddam was cruel and violent in defending his rule, and virulently antisemitic, so many assumed he was crazy or irrational. But there is no evidence for this. He was sharp and sober regarding how his rule should be preserved — something he did successfully for 24 years despite many internal and external efforts to oust him. When you listen to the tapes and read the transcripts, you encounter a calm and self-confident person, an active manager who paid attention to details and made logical decisions for his goal every day."