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Lawfare Archive: Steve Coll on Saddam Hussein and the Limits of American Power in the Middle East

March 14, 2026·58 min·5 clips

Saddam Hussein tape-recorded his leadership conversations like Richard Nixon, and Steve Coll sued the Pentagon to access them.

This Lawfare Archive episode, introduced by intern Marissa Wong in the context of 2026 U.S.-Israel airstrikes against Iran, features journalist Steve Coll discussing his book The Achilles Trap with Preston Marquis. The book draws on Saddam Hussein's secretly recorded leadership conversations — tapes as extensive as Richard Nixon's — which Coll obtained partly through suing the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information Act. Coll portrays Saddam as a shrewd but strategically blind leader. He was an autodidact from a violent peasant background who became a patron of the arts, commissioning biographical films (hiring a James Bond director for one), writing novels about Iraqi nationalism, and presiding over annual writers' conferences. Coll compares him to Tony Soprano — a man with a complicated family life at the center of his power structure, surrounded by relatives of uneven competence. His eldest son Uday was so unreliable that Saddam never appointed him to a significant position, and Uday once came closest of anyone to assassinating his father, bursting into a room with a live AK-47. The CIA relationship with Iraq began in the 1980s when the Reagan administration secretly provided Saddam with satellite imagery of Iranian military positions during the Iran-Iraq war, hoping to prevent an Iranian drive on Baghdad. Saddam accepted the intelligence but remained suspicious, assuming the photos were doctored and that the Americans were also helping Iran. The 1986 Iran-Contra scandal vindicated his paranoia, and he referenced that betrayal for the rest of his rule. After the Gulf War, three successive presidents — George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush — signed covert action findings authorizing CIA attempts at regime change. These efforts failed repeatedly, costing Iraqi collaborators their lives. By 1998, the CIA itself concluded that covert action could not remove Saddam and that only a full military invasion would work — a message that became consequential after 9/11. The central puzzle of the book is Saddam's WMD bluff. After the Gulf War, the UN demanded complete disarmament as a condition for lifting sanctions. Saddam ordered his son-in-law to destroy the weapons secretly — trucks dumped chemical agents into the desert at night with no photographs, inventories, or records. He refused to cooperate transparently with inspectors because he found the process humiliating and because he believed the U.S. would never lift sanctions regardless. When the Clinton administration confirmed in 1997 that sanctions would remain until Saddam was gone, he felt vindicated in his non-cooperation. Coll describes Saddam's logic as that of a poker player with a weak hand who kept bluffing. He wanted to preserve his power and the possibility of sanctions relief without submitting to the humiliation of supervised disarmament. This created a catastrophic analytical gap: inspectors could not verify destruction, and the absence of evidence was interpreted as evidence of concealment. That confusion, combined with the CIA's own admission that only invasion could achieve regime change, formed the foundation for the 2003 war.

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