In the pantheon of bloodthirsty dictators, Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein has almost been relegated to the dustbin of history.
He’s remembered as part of the now-quaint-seeming “axis of evil,” for having psychopathic sons, Uday and Qusay, and a murderous cousin named “Chemical Ali,” and perhaps most of all for not having weapons of mass destruction.
The March 2003 invasion of Iraq was premised on the claim that Saddam had amassed chemical and biological weapons and was ready to use them.
But there were none and the cavalry charge to Baghdad turned into a decade-long morass that cost more than $728 billion and led to the death of 4,492 US servicemembers.
Now his final secrets are being revealed in a new book based in part on Saddam’s secret tapes which its author fought a legal battle to get.
“The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq,” by Steve Coll, uses details of what Saddam told CIA and FBI interrogators over cigars and the own Nixon-style recordings he made during his 24-year reign, which the CIA retrieved from his ruined palaces in Baghdad.
They reveal the Saddam nobody knew and show how just how much the CIA misunderstood the butcher of Baghdad.
For one, Saddam fancied himself a creative talent, writing four novels and financing a film when he was in power, and just as the Bush administration’s rhetoric heated up against him, he was more into writing than military affairs. In the days before his December 2006 hanging he turned to writing poetry.
The author Coll, a veteran journalist, doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the CIA’s massive “miscalculation” and “missteps” in invading Iraq.
But he doesn’t let Saddam off the hook either, making it clear that the Ba’athist dictator bungled his side of things, both underestimating the US decision to invade and not doing enough to make it clear that he had no WMDs because of his own ego and poor sense of political strategy.
“Why did Mr. Hussein sacrifice his long reign in power — and ultimately his life — by creating an impression that he held dangerous weapons when he did not?” Coll wrote in a New York Times essay tied to the launch of his book.
Coll then explains that Hussein did secretly order the destruction of all his chemical and biological weapons, which is what the US and the UN told him to do — but then covered it up for fear of appearing weak to his own people as well as the West.
“One of the mistakes some people make is that when the enemy has decided to hurt you, you believe there is a chance to decrease the harm by acting in a certain way,” he told a subordinate, according to Coll’s book. “In fact, he said, ‘The harm won’t be less.’”
(“Hussein recorded his private leadership conversations as assiduously as Richard Nixon,” Coll wrote.)
It didn’t help that Hussein, however shrewd and ruthless he could be, was the product of a harsh rural peasant upbringing near the provincial city of Tikrit where violence was a part of daily life. Hussein’s father died before he was born and his stepfather, a formidable man with a wicked streak, was said to be hard on Saddam.
Saddam in turn wrote in his autobiography that he was a scary little boy, intimidating other kids by brandishing a gun and once pistol-whipping someone on a bus who didn’t move over to make room.
But his tribesman toughness was no help when it came to dealing with the fog of perception and mixed messages coming from the West, or what Coll calls Saddam’s “tragic, decades-long conflict with Washington” that included a collaboration with the CIA during the 1980s, and the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991.
His tragedy, which became the West’s as well since the invasion of Iraq led to the eventual rise of ISIS and empowered Iran, was naively thinking that Washington was more “omniscient” and competent than it really was, Coll argues.
He thought the CIA “already knew” he had no dangerous weapons.
Then again, he was a virulent anti-semite who also thought the CIA was totally run by Jews. He even banned his own spies from learning Hebrew in case they became sympathetic to Jews.
Threaded in between the revelations of Hussein’s own self-destruction, however, Coll draws a sometimes sympathetic portrait of Saddam before his capture and hanging. He was discovered by US forces in December 2003 hiding in a “spider hole” near a farmhouse near Tikrit
“The thing about Saddam as an adult is that he wasn’t really a crazy person,” Coll told The Post. “It sounds weird to say but he was comfortable in his own skin.”
He first seized power in 1979 with a ruthless purge of the ruling Ba’ath party’s elite, and was mostly seen in his military uniform.
At home, he was responsible for an astonishing scale of suffering and death. He went to war against Iran in 1980, with the 8-year conflict becoming a World War One-style morass of trench warfare.
And he used poison gas against the Iranian troops and then against his own people, gassing rebellious Kurds repeatedly, an atrocity which showed he — then — had both WMD and no compunction about using them.
He invaded Kuwait in 1990 and, the tapes reveal, thought he would get away with it, asking why America had not warned him against invading in advance.
But he saw himself as more than a political leader.
“He saw himself a man of culture,” Coll told The Post. “He invited poets to his office and clearly wanted to be seen as a multi-dimensional person. He read like a fiend.He read biographies of great men and read literature from the post World War II Arab world.”
When he traveled abroad, Saddam dressed like a dandy in “burnt-orange, double-breasted, wide-striped business suits” and tipped lavishly.
Saddam wrote four propaganda-heavy novels and a number of poems and financed 1983’s “Clash of Loyalties,” an epic propaganda film starring Oliver Reed about the 1920 revolution in Iraq against the British occupation.
British actor Marc Sinden was hired to co-star but before he left the UK for filming in Iraq, he persuaded him to do double duty as a spy.
Sinden’s efforts at espionage involved mainly taking photos of modern Baghdad and its layout for British intelligence, along with peering down from his hotel room and watching trucks full of boys leaving for the then-frontline war with Iran — and returning with corpses, he said in a 2014 interview.
Sinden and Oliver Reed were invited to the presidential palace for dinner with Saddam and a phalanx of his generals as well as Saddam’s vicious son, Uday.
“He was a little s–t,” said Sinden. “Nasty man. At one point Saddam went into the most extraordinary revolutionary rant. No idea what he was talking about, it was in Arabic. I could only liken it to watching Goebbels. The sheer power of oratory, we were sucked into it. He might have been ordering more food. But we were all mesmerized.”
The cabinet files reveal that his ministers experienced similar unstoppable rants — often anti-semitic.
His aides also got sent his hand-written manuscripts to his team to edit, but rarely took their suggestions, Coll said.
Saddam’s first book, “Zabibah and the King,” was published in 2000 and is nominally a love story about a powerful ruler of medieval Iraq and a beautiful commoner named Zabibah who’s married to a cruel man who rapes her.
The book was widely seen as an allegory: the ruler representing Saddam; Zabibah the people of Iraq; and her evil husband the US and, inevitably, Israel.
“Zabibah and the King,” was turned into a 20-part TV series on Iraqi television as well as a musical play.
His other books were “The Fortified Castle,” “Men in the City,” which details the rise of the Ba’ath Party in Tikrit, and “Begone Demons,” a novel allegedly completed the day before the US invasion that describes, using Biblical metaphors, a Zionist-Christian conspiracy against Arabs and Muslims.
“The more he wrote, the more he identified as a man of letters,” Coll writes. “One evening, at the height of his novel-writing period, Saddam heard a television presenter make a grammatical error while reading a statement.
“The president telephoned the minister of culture to protest. An investigation ensued; the presenter reread the statement properly on the air and was suspended for six months.”
Coll was less than enthusiastic about Saddam’s literary efforts, however.
“He had no discernible talent,” Coll said. “But he did have a lot of stamina when it came to sitting down and actually writing and finishing his books and poetry.”
Despite being distracted by his desire to be a dictator of letters — at the time the CIA thought he was amassing more WMD — Saddam was weighing up the chances of being invaded by a US-led coalition throughout 2002 and early 2003.
But, the tapes reveal that he told his inner circle, prophetically that it would never happen: an invasion, he said, would hit Bush’s popularity at home.