The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq Hardcover – February 27, 2024

Immersive, engaging, reads more like a novel. I'd wager even the fussiest historians could find fault in Coll's research. Highly recommended.

Like others I have read by the author, this book is rich in detail, very well written. It is an important contribution to the history of events that brought instability and violence to an already unsettled part of the world.

It has now been twenty-one (21) years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in early spring of 2003. It was at the time, and has proven some 21 years later, to have been a strategic miscalculation of the highest order. The strategic impetus behind the war has long since been proven to be an illusion created by neo-cons in the George W. Bush administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bush himself), but mistaken foreign policy and inability to view the strategic outcome of the war had its conception some twenty years prior in the early 1980s way back to the Reagan administration [the Iran-contra fiasco] and its successor administration, the George H.W. Bush administration [first Gulf War]. Coll does an excellent job tying together the pieces from both the U.S. perspective and of Saddam's Iraq that led up to this strategic blunder. This is a deep historical examination and critical analysis of U.S. military and foreign policy that resulted in the Iraq War of 2003. Well worth reading.

Favorite book of the year by far! I would consider this a dual biography of Saddam Hussein and his WMDs and the American relationship with him which began in the early 1980s. The author in detail explains chronologically how each presidential administration as well as the intelligence and diplomatic communities handled Saddam Hussein’s megalomania, chronic paranoia and belligerence from the Iran-Iraq War; the first Gulf War following the invasion of Kuwait; post war tensions with U.N. weapons inspectors; the ever looming questions about weapons of master destruction and through the initial invasion, capture and execution of Saddam Hussein. The author, though critical of American foreign policy, balances out the narrative by explaining how and why Saddam Hussein was just as responsible for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the terrible years that followed as the Bush Administration was in its eagerness to topple him. This was a real page turner and filled in a lot of my historical blanks about this era.

I really enjoyed this book. I previously read the "The End of Iraq" (some year back) and found the information and disclosures there to be very interesting. This book extends to the insights of Iraqi government officials and their perceptions of the US and the west in general. The mixed signals given to that regime were just tremendously stupid.A very enjoyable book.

Great depth and details to flush out this space and time in history. I remember a lot of this. No one wins in war.

I have long held the view that the ideal time to write history is in the 30-50 year out frame. I feel it affords the historian the opportunity of perspective, while still allowing for first person interviews with people who were there at the time. By that standard, the war in Iraq is just now coming in range, and Steve Coll's remarkable account of the origins of the American invasion of Iraq confirms my bias.Oddly, confirmation bias is one of the main themes of the book. Once leaders on either side have an idea in their heads, all events seem to confirm it. Saddam was bluffing that he had weapons of mass destruction, but he also assumed the US, through their CIA knew it. It never occurred to him that they would ignore their own intelligence. On our side, nothing, even invading and occupying the country, could shake us from the belief that Saddam had WMD. When we were holding him as a prisoner of war we were still interrogating him about hidden WMD.Readers should know this is a foreign policy/historical analysis book, rather than military history. It is more about how the war started than the war itself. The American invasion of Iraq happens quite near the end of the book. Coll describes how American policy moved from the Reagan administration's efforts to prop up Saddam as a bulwark against Iranian expansion; through Saddam's breathtakingly stupid attempt to take over Kuwait; the elder Bush's coordinated effort to throw him back; Clinton's containment, kick the can down the road approach, to the younger Bush's decision to seek regime change, using the pretext of Sept. 11.I thought I followed this pretty closely during the years it was happening, but I learned a lot, especially about the Iraqi side of events. The book moves along briskly, covering decades of high level decision making in America and Iraq.Highly recommended.

The book is easy to follow and extremely insightful. I have said for many years I would like to go to my grave with some understanding of why 'Dubya' made the decisions he did. I don't think he will ever come clean about it, but it is good to have some of my suspicions confirmed by this book. The vast quantity of errors by 4 administrations is so disturbing. But, it is better to know the truth, even when it's ugly, rather than not.The value of this work cannot be overstated.