The Achilles Trap

Coll's case rests on newly surfaced Iraqi state records and intercepted conversations, letting him reconstruct Saddam Hussein's reasoning from the inside rather than treating him as a cartoon villain to be defeated. The book's most unsettling move is showing how Saddam's own paranoia about Iran, not a coherent WMD program, drove the ambiguity that Washington later read as concealment. Coll spends as much time on U.S. intelligence failures and self-deception as on Baghdad's, refusing the comfortable narrative where only one side misjudged the other. The structure is patient and heavily documented rather than propulsive, which suits a book more interested in explaining a two-decade chain of miscalculation than in re-litigating the war's morality. It reads as a study of mirrored blindness.