Steve
Coll
is the
author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning
Ghost
Wars
and dean
emeritus of the Columbia Journalism School, and from 2007 to 2013
was president of New America, a public policy institute in
Washington, DC. He is an editor at
The
Economist
in
London, was a staff writer at The
New
Yorker
for
nearly two decades, and before that was a writer and editor
at The
Washington
Post, where he received a Pulitzer
Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of nine
books, including The
Bin
Ladens,
Private
Empire,
Directorate
S, and
The
Achilles
Trap.
“Excellent
. .
. A
more
intimate
picture
of
the
dictator’s
thinking
about
world
politics,
local
power
and
his
relationship
to
the
United
States
than
has
been
seen
before.”
—The
New
York
Times
“Voluminously
researched
and
compulsively
readable.”
—Air
Mail
From
bestselling
and
Pulitzer
Prize–winning
author
Steve
Coll,
the
definitive
story
of
the
decades-long
relationship
between
the
United
States
and
Saddam
Hussein,
and
a deeply
researched
and
news-breaking
investigation
into
how
human
error,
cultural
miscommunication,
and
hubris
led
to
one
of
the
costliest
geopolitical
conflicts
of
our
time
When the
United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq,
under the control of strongman Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of
mass destruction that, if left unchecked, posed grave danger to the
world. But when no WMDs were found, the United States and its
allies were forced to examine the political and intelligence
failures that had led to the invasion and the occupation, and the
civil war that followed. One integral question has remained
unsolved: Why had Saddam seemingly sacrificed his long reign in
power by giving the false impression that he had hidden stocks of
dangerous weapons? The
Achilles
Trap
masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power, and
geopolitics that led to America’s disastrous war with Iraq and, for
the first time, details America’s fundamental miscalculations
during its decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Beginning
with Saddam’s rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq’s secret
nuclear weapons program, Steve Coll traces Saddam’s motives by way
of his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists,
family members, and generals who had no choice but to defer to
their leader—a leader directly responsible for the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the torture or
imprisonment of hundreds of thousands more. This was a man whose
reasoning was impossible to reduce to a simple explanation, and the
CIA and successive presidential administrations failed to grasp
critical nuances of his paranoia, resentments, and
inconsistencies—even when the stakes were incredibly high. Calling
on unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving
participants, and Saddam’s own transcripts and audio files, Coll
pulls together an incredibly comprehensive portrait of a man who
was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly. A
work of great historical significance,
The
Achilles
Trap
is the
definitive account of how corruptions of power, lies of diplomacy,
and vanity—on both sides—led to avoidable errors of statecraft,
ones that would enact immeasurable human suffering and forever
change the political landscape as we know it.