The Downfall of Saddam Hussein: Misjudgments, Paranoia & A Secret with Steve Coll

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:47The relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein was decades long, and it was a relationship that led to one of the most costliest geopolitical conflicts of our time. However, there are still unresolved questions. Did he really try to assassinate President George H.W. Bush? Why did he give the impression that he had hidden stocks of dangerous weapons? My guest today, Steve Kahl, has answers for us.

1:19Joining us now on Open Book is Steve Kahl. He wrote The Achilles Trap, among many other books, but The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the origins of the American invasion of Iraq. It reads like a thriller, actually, Steve. I really enjoyed the book. Of course, I read your, I don't know if it was your first book, but the first book that I was introduced to was given to me by George Tenet, the former CIA director. I've been in Republican Party politics for many, many years. And I read Ghost Wars, which I also found fascinating. I think these two books are connected, although I read that book probably two decades ago.

1:57So I'm going to ask you a little bit about that book if you don't mind, but welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. You know, the new evidence that you're presenting is phenomenal here. And so I want to start there, if you don't mind. Take us through the invasion and what people thought in sort of the 0203 timeframe. And again, just for our viewers and listeners, this invasion took place in March of 2003, the Iraqi invasion. But take us through what we thought then and what we know now? Well, we thought that Saddam Hussein was a threat post 9-11 because he possessed weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, biological, maybe a nuclear program, nuclear weapons program.

2:38And it turned out he didn't have any of those things. And our intelligence agencies thought he did, reported to the Bush administration that he had all these weapons was hiding them. So most of the rest of our allies thought the same thing. Even those who opposed the invasion thought he had the stuff. So it was a bit of a shock to discover that he really had destroyed it all, as he had claimed, even though he left everyone with the impression that he was lying. And so my project was to try to understand what he was thinking? Like, how did that happen? And as you referred to, I had some new evidence to work with, which mostly tape recordings that he made of his own leadership conversations.

3:23He tape recorded his inner sanctum conversations as often as Richard Nixon did. And those tapes have a troubled history. We can talk about it if it's interesting, but I got a lot of them. And that's what the book is about. What was he thinking? How did he create this false impression that he had WMD that he didn't have? Well, I mean, I read Ghost Wars and obviously, unfortunately, you know, I had a short stay in the government. It was short, but I learned a lot in the government. And we get a lot wrong. We misfire. And of course, if someone gets the opportunity to read a presidential daily brief, my reaction to the brief, I was horrified by some of the threats to the United States.

4:03But secondarily, I was also, it was an enlightenment to recognize that there's all probabilities in the brief. You know, we don't know a lot. You know, we are guessing at things. We were guessing at the location of Osama bin Laden before we attacked that house in Pakistan. And so this new evidence that you're uncovering is also raising doubts about the truth of the accusation of the assassination of George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush's father by Saddam Hussein. Sandy Berger thought the plot was faked. What do you think? I think it's not established that the plot was real. I guess that's a little bit of an indirect way to say it, but I think that's kind of where the evidence leaves you.

4:43It is a fascinating episode. I think, you know, your listeners might remember after the Gulf War, the successful war that George H.W. Bush led to expel Saddam Hussein's troops from Kuwait, which they had occupied, invaded and occupied. And after his presidency, George H.W. Bush visited Kuwait to be kind of recognized and celebrated by the Kuwaiti people who were very grateful to have their country back. And he brought along Jeb Bush and other members of the family. George W. was not there, but I think Laura was. And they had, you know, a big feast at the palace and he gave a talk at a university.

5:20And then after he left safely on his way, nothing happened while he was in Kuwait. And then after he left, the Kuwaitis announced that they had found a car bomb that was intended to blow him up. They found it in a garage someplace. And that led to an investigation and an allegation, very publicized allegation, that Saddam was behind this car bomb and that he had tried to kill Bush in revenge for the Kuwait war. So that evidence surfaced during the Clinton administration, and there was a big review as to whether it was believable. And what we now have is a lot of evidence from the Iraqi side that basically leaves you wondering, was this really just a Kuwaiti propaganda operation?

6:00So it's interesting because we have pictures going back into the 80s of Donald Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam Hussein. We know that we were funding Saddam Hussein during the Iraqi-Iranian war. We had two interesting allies, American allies. One was by the name of Osama bin Laden, a very interesting American ally. We supplied Stinger missiles to Mr. bin Laden and his Mujahideen. We changed the names of these people from holy warriors to terrorists, depending on what they're doing and what we're thinking. But we gave him Stinger missiles, helped to bring down the Soviet empire in Afghanistan. But Hussein, when his neck is being cracked in his execution, prior to that, the FBI interviews him and he says, where's Ronald Reagan when I needed him?

6:47You remember that conversation? Stephen, so go into that a little bit for us. What was Hussein thinking? Why do you think he wanted people to believe he had weapons of mass destruction when he didn't? What was the conflicts there in the relationship with the Americans? Yeah, so it's the heart of the matter, what you're asking about. Very briefly, the Iranian revolution in 1979 was obviously a huge shock to the United States. And soon after it, Saddam Hussein started a war with Iran, invaded them, thinking that Iran was weak because of the revolution. And it just was a big miscalculation. Then a terrible war ensued.

7:29It lasted through much of the 1980s. A million people died and was basically a stalemate. But at times during that war, It looked like the Iranians were going to break through Iraqi lines and go capture Baghdad and extend their theocratic state and their revolutionary ambitions with the benefits of now owning Iraqi oil as well as Iranian oil. And the Reagan administration was desperate that Saddam not lose this war that he had started. They didn't love him, but he was a secular strongman and he was better than Ayatollah Khomeini. That was the calculation. And what they really wanted was just to make sure he didn't lose.

8:03So they opened up a CIA channel to provide him with satellite intelligence so that he could see the Iranian positions and prevent any breakthroughs. That more or less worked. But it kind of left Saddam confused about whether the United States was his friend or playing a double game. Because when Iran-Contra happened in the 1980s, it also turned out we were helping the Iranians during the same war. And it left him deeply suspicious. Just, you know, he's not the only leader in the world who believed that the CIA was all powerful, omniscient. And to get to your question about the WMD and why he created this false impression, one of the reasons is that he believed that the CIA knows everything.

8:44And so the CIA knew that he didn't have the WMD. So when the intelligence agencies or American politicians accused him of having this, he knew that it was just a game because the CIA knew the truth. And it was all just a pretense to invade and get rid of him. So why should he play the game? Why should he cooperate? Because he knew what was really going on, quote unquote. The idea that the CIA could get something like that wrong, just not part of his worldview. You know, they're too powerful, too good at what they do. Yeah. So, I mean, it's a lot to unpack here because the American people get a certain slice of information from the news media.

9:21And, you know, the media has a tendency to make things black and white, good versus evil. But yet there's a lot of complexity in this story. And I want to talk about the start of the Kuwaiti war with Iraq or the Iraqi war with Kuwait. How did that war start? Okay. Some people believe that there was some diagonal drilling going on by the Kuwaitis into disputed oil wells on the border that instigated Saddam's action. Is that a false rumor? Is that fake news, sir? I mean, there might have been disputable drilling like that going on. I think you have to step back and remind ourselves that from the British colonial period of the 20th century forward, the border between Iraq and Kuwait was disputed.

10:08There were just various disputes about it. All right. So I want to interrupt you for a second, if you don't mind, because I have a lot of young viewers and listeners. And so what Steve is referring to is a treaty that was initiated in the, towards the end of the first world war. It's called the Sykes-Picot Treaty. And for those of you listening, you can Google the Sykes-Picot Treaty. There's also a great book about this, The Peace to End All Peace by David Frumkin, where the British and the French are evacuating alongside of the Ottoman Empire from the Middle East, and they draw lines in the sand effectively, which create tribal and border disputes among all of these ancient tribes in the region.

10:49Some people believe that this was done maliciously so that there would be a forever war in the Middle East after this evacuation. So what Steve is referring to, there's a line in the sand. One side is Iraq, which is frankly an imaginary country. I guess these bureaucrats thought, let's put the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds in a country. They all hate each other. We'll call it Iraq. And then they drew a line in the sand and created Kuwait. And there's always been a dispute on that border. Didn't mean to interrupt you, sir, but I think it's important to apply some context here for these listeners.

11:22And so we have this dispute. The war starts. Yeah, no, that's well done. I mean, the reason the dispute mattered after that line in the sand was drawn is that it turned out that line in the sand was sitting on one of the largest deposits of oil in the world, very easily accessible, easy to drill, easy to ship. So it became a source of real financial and economic rivalry between Iraq and Kuwait. And Iraq wanted the finance after the war with Iran. the country was broke. And Saddam felt that he had fought the Iranians on behalf of the weaker Gulf states, including Kuwait, that they owed him. Like he had shed blood to keep them safe from the Iranian revolution.

12:02And so why shouldn't they pay him back? And so the dispute about the border was really a dispute about billions of dollars that he felt was owed to him for having fought this war. Anyway, he decided to invade Kuwait and to take over the whole emirate. And he planned secretly in the spring of 1990, we now know, to do so. And he basically created an information campaign to fool his Arab neighbors, to fool the Kuwaitis, to fool the Egyptians and the Americans. He gave the impression that he was negotiating, that maybe this was just about slant drilling. Maybe he would settle for a little bit of the oil field that he didn't have already.

12:38But in fact, we now know that he planned to loot Kuwait all along. He had an idea of taking over the whole emirate and incorporating it into Iraq as a new province of Iraq. And that's exactly what he did on August 2nd, 1990. So this is a fascinating, very complicated story. You get into it. The book is unbelievable. It's a CIA, the origins and the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. Why do you call it the Achilles strap, sir? I think it's a fascinating title. Why did you call it that? Well, I like title. Did you ever watch Star Trek? You're a big fan of Star Trek. Yes, I'm a Trekkie as well. Yeah, you'll find that I am way nerdier than the media gives me credit for, Paul.

13:18You'll find that about me. Yes, go ahead. Then I share that with you. I love those episode titles with, you know, they were always zipping around space and they'd run into some Greek god who was blocking their way or protecting a planet. They go down to the planet and there would be some. So I like stories that had those. That's a kind of science fiction title, The Achilles Trap. But the reason it occurred to me, besides it sort of ringing a bell from a genre of titles that I find appealing, is that both Saddam and the United States used the Achilles myth to describe their enemy and to persuade themselves that their enemy was more vulnerable than it turned out they were.

13:58So the CIA's covert operations to foment a coup against Saddam were codenamed within the CIA system, Achilles. That was the name of the operation. And then when I was going into these new materials from Saddam's regime, I was stunned when he started explaining to his audience why he thought the Americans would never invade him, why they were a bit of a paper tiger. and he used the Achilles myth himself. He said every great power has its Achilles heel. And in the case of the United States, he thought that we were so averse to casualties that we would never invade him and that the kind of pinprick strikes of the Clinton years where whenever he violated the disarmament rules or sanctions rules, we would hit him with cruise missiles or we enforced the no-fly zone.

14:48And it was a kind of a cat and mouse game, but we never put any boots on the ground. And so he had concluded from that containment strategy that the American people simply wouldn't put up with an invasion. And that was why they had never done it before. That was our Achilles seal. You wonderfully expose all of this in the book. I just wanted you to share that with the viewers and the listeners. We could talk about Uday. Okay. And so I'm old enough to remember Uday and QC. And I think they were part of the deck of cards of villains that the Bush administration produced 20 plus years ago. But this is Saddam's son who has a very troubled relationship with him.

15:26He's reckless and violent. But you have a new account in the book of him turning up with a rifle to attempt to kill his father. Tell us about that. Yeah, I mean, I was stunned. The basic idea that Uday was dangerous and reckless and violent was understood, but this episode was not in the public domain before. And it basically followed a night party in Baghdad where Uday, apparently drunk, had hit Saddam's beloved valet over the head with a wooden cane and inadvertently probably killed him. The guy fell down. Uday walked away. It turned out he had a brain hemorrhage and he died later. Saddam was furious.

16:09A great scene ensued between father and son. I'll spare you the details, but there was a lot of shouting at the hospital. Uday grabbed a bottle of pills, threatened to kill himself, then grabbed a gun, ran away to a safe house, drank for two or three days. And then finally, he decided to confront his father at their sort of suburban estate. And he came out there with his AK-47 loaded. And whether he was still wasted or not, I don't know, but he was behaving erratically. Saddam had summoned other members of the family because it was a crisis. And his half-brother and his son, Kuse, were sitting in the living room with him when Uday turned up with this rifle at the front door.

16:51And he started shooting, shot at the feet of his brother and his uncle as they tried to talk him down. And then by the uncle's account, he finally sort of burst into tears and they got him to put the rifle down. And then more drama ensued. At one point, he apparently called the U.S. Embassy, Uday, and said, I'd like to defect because my father is his, and Saddam said to his half-brother, you know, it's really good that I didn't have my pistol because if I had, I would have shot him and killed him. And one of the things that's striking about it, besides just a reminder that this was a family, this was family rule, and that it was a very troubled coalition of powerful and violent individuals.

17:35But, you know, so much effort was undertaken by the United States, by Britain, by other countries to try to get close to Saddam and end his regime, whether in a violent coup or some other way to get him out of office. And that work went on for 10 years. And it turns out the only person who really had a shot at him was his son. Yeah, it's just an incredible story. And I think you and I both know that the Iraqi war could have been prevented. And so let's say, imaginary, I've got you in the White House briefing room. You're briefing a new president, not the two elderly presidents that were being faced with this election, but this is an imaginary president that probably doesn't have your depth of history.

18:18What would you say to that president about the mistakes that were made by the United States leading it? First of all, was that war necessary, yes or no, your opinion? And then secondarily, if you think it was unnecessary and avoidable, what were the mistakes that were made by the U.S.? It would be a cautionary tale for a future president. I don't think it was necessary. I think the main mistake was to lose faith in deterrence and containment against an enemy who was weaker than he appeared. And why that mistake was made is still subject of active debate inside the United States. But I think what I was trying to do is enlarge our thinking about that error by including this Saddam side of the story.

19:04Because if you look at the world today, you know, we're trying to manage dictatorships in lots of different countries. Some of these characters are hard to understand. You know, the leader in North Korea just is easy to caricature and dismiss as a kind of cartoon figure. That's how we handled Saddam. We just sort of dismissed him as a cartoon dictator. And we didn't talk to him for 12 years. So we lost contact. We lost insights into what he was doing and what he was thinking. And that, I think, is the lesson, one of the big lessons from this failure that would be relevant to that imaginary future president.

19:41Like, you know, yes, it's hard with domestic politics and it can be morally troubling to have contact with an evil adversary. But to just give in to, you know, the easy cliches of this person, you know, is beyond redemption or beyond understanding, that's also a path to serious error. You don't have to sanitize another person in order to try to understand them. It's very well put. And the world is way more complex than the black and white that we're often taught. Saddam was working on a novel, his fourth novel. at the time of the invasion yeah this was the kind of to me that that's the that's the evidence for making the case that contact even with a very difficult and and disturbing adversary is worth it because you can get insights that aren't available any other way in this case we went to war thinking that saddam was the same person he had been when he invaded kuwait or when we fought a war with him in 1990, 1991.

20:45In fact, he was considerably older and his interests had changed. He wasn't interested in military affairs as much as he had been. He wasn't even interested in trying to conquer the Arab world's affections as much as he had been, except through writing. And he had become obsessed with novel writing. He had written four novels in maybe five years. His aides said that he was writing longhand for hours at a time. They were never quite sure whether he was up all night or spending his days doing it, but he would be passing these handwritten pages into them for typing and grammatical corrections, though he didn't take edits very well.

21:22And naturally, you wouldn't want to piss him off by telling him his prose was a little long-winded, which it was, in fact. But yeah, he had become more interested in his reputation as a man of letters in the Arab world and as a writer. He had this whole system of subsidizing novelists and having them gather with him and talk about literature. And none of this was really apparent at the time. He was still seen as the guy in green fatigues with the pistol strapped to his belt and forever a warrior. You know, it's just one of these super fascinating things. You know, and I hearken back to a op-ed that was written by George Soros.

22:02Of course, now he is a villain of the right wing. But George Soros said in November of 2001 in an op-ed, in the New York Times to the American government, please don't overreact. It's not clear that the Taliban is actually your enemy. And it's certainly not clear that going to war with Saddam Hussein is going to solve or accomplish anything. And yet, of course, the Americans did overreact, as you and I both know. And we've caused trillions of dollars of losses to the American treasury. And obviously, the blood that was spilled was horrific. I had the opportunity to visit Iraq on a troop support mission in 2011.

22:37I was actually there to see Lloyd Austin, who's now our defense secretary. And we were in one of Saddam's old palaces. And he made the point that we're here now. If we leave, there's going to be another, this Republican guard that we had the opportunity to pay. You and I both know this. We could have given him a hundred million dollars and the Republican guard could have kept track of everybody. But by making that decision, Bremer and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld making that decision not to pay them. Many of them turned into the insurgency, ultimately ended up as ISIS. And so there's a lot of things that went wrong here.

23:11And you write so beautifully about this. I think it's very, very important for people to know about it, which is why I appreciate you coming on. I end these podcasts with five words, sir. I'm going to read out these words and you're going to give me a one sentence, if you don't mind, reaction to these words. Okay. You ready? Okay. I can't promise I'll be very good at this, but I'm ready. Iraq. A state that deserves better neighbors. America. You know, a beacon of the greatest ideas in human history that has a lot of work to do at home. We need to remember that. You know, it's a wonderful place, but certainly needs stronger leadership and a little bit more clarity.

23:53The CIA, that's really not a word, but we'll use the three letters, CIA. I think one of the most fascinating institutions in post-war America, misunderstood, but a great national resource overall. Yeah, no question. I'm obviously a huge fan of the CIA, despite all the conspiracy nonsense. Osama bin Laden. A confused and violent young man who should have been stopped long before he changed the course of American history. Yeah. And we shot cruise missiles at him in August of 1998. People thought that was a distraction by Bill Clinton. I think we missed him by a few minutes. Saddam Hussein, sir. A product of a country that was too divided to yield stable leadership and who, you know, caused more death and suffering than any leader in the Middle East of his generation.

24:49Well, the book is fascinating, sir, is the Achilles trap. Saddam Hussein, the CIA and the origins of America's invasion of Iraq. New information in this book, but it's a wonderful exposition of what happened. and if you're interested in the Middle East and you're interested in America's future role and past role in the Middle East, please pick up Steve's book. I really enjoyed this, sir. I hope you'll come back when you have another book to write. I know that's not your last book, sir, so I hope you'll come back when you produce another one. I appreciate it. I really enjoyed talking with you and thanks for taking the work so seriously.

25:22I really appreciate that too. Oh, my pleasure, sir.

25:31so steve kahl has written many brilliant books it's not just the achilles trap and ghost wars he wrote a fascinating book about exxon he wrote an incredible book called the directorate about the cia and these books are always well researched they're always balanced and objective but i think the number one thing that I take away from a Steve Kahl book is that there's trouble. There's trouble in the world. There's trouble in paradise. There are greedy people. There are malevolent people. And of course, there's a series of very, very good people. You may have caught at the end of our interview that Mr.