The U.S. experience with Saddam Hussein was shameful and contradictory. Coll wisely starts with the Reagan administration cultivating him as a bulwark against Iran. While the Iraqi ambassador, Nizar Hamdoon, became the toast of Embassy Row, a U.S. intelligence program called Druid Leader fed Hussein targeting information as he bathed Iranian soldiers in chemical weapons and Washington pretended not to see his genocide of the Kurds. All these green lights contributed to Hussein asking the Americans, in captivity 15 years later, “If you didn’t want me to go in [to Kuwait], why didn’t you tell me?”
After winning the Gulf War, George H.W. Bush infamously encouraged doomed Iraqi rebellions to overthrow Hussein. Those failures left America, at the zenith of its geopolitical power, with Hussein as a holdout in an oil-rich region. Long before 1998, when Congress and Bill Clinton made regime change official U.S. policy, the elder Bush and then Clinton tasked the CIA with overthrowing him.
“The Liar’s Truths” is Coll’s clever subtitle for the section of the book that deals with the period between the Gulf War and 9/11. Intentionally or not, the phrase applies not only to Hussein but to U.S. policymakers, whose blindness was willful. Making news, Coll skillfully debunks the oft-told story that Hussein tried to have George H.W. Bush assassinated in 1993. But by then, Hussein’s placement as a U.S. adversary was a fixed idea. In 1996, Clinton candidly told Britain’s Tony Blair that he should negotiate with Aziz, but “that is such a heavy-laden decision in America. I can’t do that.” That type of cowardice, characteristic of U.S. foreign policy then and now, “deprived the administration of a chance to probe Saddam’s motivations and claims about WMD up close, ultimately contributing to America’s blindness to the truth,” Coll writes. In 2002, Blair’s intelligence chief concluded that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around [U.S.] policy.” As egregious as George W. Bush’s behavior was, it displayed more continuity than departure from well-worn patterns of U.S. policy on Iraq.