0:04

From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian

0:07

Lehrer. This is my daily

0:09

politics podcast. It's Tuesday,

0:11

February 27. With

0:15

us now, the journalist Steve Call,

0:18

CLL, one of the most knowledgeable

0:20

people anywhere about America's tortured relationship

0:22

with the Middle East. After

0:24

9-11, he won a Pulitzer Prize

0:26

for his book, Ghost Wars, The

0:28

Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan,

0:31

and Bin Laden from the Soviet

0:33

invasion to September 10, 2001.

0:36

He wrote another book called The

0:38

Bin Ladens, An Arabian Family in

0:41

the American Century, and one called

0:43

Private Empire, Exxon Mobile and American

0:45

Power, among other books.

0:48

Steve was The Washington Post's first

0:50

international investigative correspondent based in London.

0:52

He's also been managing editor of

0:54

The Washington Post, dean of the

0:56

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism,

0:59

president of the New America Foundation

1:01

Think Tank, and a New Yorker

1:03

staff writer. He recently joined The

1:05

Economist as a senior editor, and

1:07

now with America's relationship with the

1:10

Middle East again a central issue,

1:12

he has a new book called

1:14

The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein,

1:16

the CIA, and the Origins of

1:18

America's Invasion of Iraq. He also

1:21

had a New Yorker article in

1:23

December called A Ruinous War and

1:25

Peacemaking in Gaza. So let's see

1:27

what we can learn about, have

1:30

the history in his new

1:32

book, perhaps informs the current crisis. Steve,

1:34

I always learn things reading your work,

1:37

and when you come on the show,

1:39

welcome back to WNYC. Thank

1:41

you, Brian. It's great to be back. Just

1:43

to set the stage about the book first,

1:45

what does the title mean, The Achilles

1:48

Trap? Well it

1:50

refers to the deep misunderstandings

1:54

of, between Saddam Hussein

1:56

and the United States, that

1:58

unfolded between. Saddam

2:00

for came to Power and Nineteen

2:02

Seventy Nine and the invasion that

2:04

Us lead in two thousand and

2:07

Three. That particular phrase reflects the

2:09

fact that both Saddam and the

2:11

United States use the kill his

2:13

heel metaphor to explain why their

2:15

enemy was vulnerable, when in fact

2:18

both have some had kind of

2:20

mistaken ideas about their enemy com.

2:22

But that's the real kind of

2:24

starting point for the book. The

2:26

reason that I spent four years

2:28

working on it was. That.

2:32

In thinking back on

2:35

the catastrophic. Invasion

2:37

and the war that followed. I'm

2:40

in our kind of reckoning, has.

2:42

Been. Located understandably in Us decision

2:45

making. So George W. Bush

2:47

is choices. The manipulated intelligence,

2:49

the false intelligence, the media's

2:51

complicity. But there's another set

2:53

of questions about where this

2:56

war came from that have

2:58

hardly ever been examined. And

3:00

essentially they boil down to

3:02

why did Saddam Hussein. Sacrifice.

3:06

His own long rain in power,

3:08

ultimately his own life for the

3:10

sake of weapons that he didn't

3:13

possess. Why did that happen? Tense

3:15

It turns out to this question

3:17

was answerable because Saddam Hussein tape

3:19

recorded his leadership conversations over many,

3:22

many years and he left a

3:24

extraordinary archive of record set on

3:26

sadly is not publicly available but

3:28

with the help of the Reporters

3:31

Committee for Freedom under pressure suit

3:33

got a big batch of them

3:35

and anywhere. That is the investigation

3:37

that this book or six

3:40

years seeks to deliver, which

3:42

is essentially the other side

3:44

of the story of where

3:46

this war came from. Yeah,

3:48

and so will talk about

3:50

Saddam through his perspectives and

3:52

where he went wrong to

3:54

draw this ruinous more on

3:56

his country. Ah, and there

3:58

are lessons from. Even that

4:00

for today are bigger. You sued the

4:03

Pentagon. I just want people to know

4:05

that you sued the Pentagon to get

4:07

access to these countless hours of what

4:09

you call the Saddam Tapes. And these

4:11

were actually tape recordings that the Iraqi

4:13

Dictator made of himself. like the Nixon

4:16

tapes when Richard Nixon was President of

4:18

the United States in the White House.

4:20

Guess I'm in. Generally the setting wasn't

4:22

quite as intimate as the Oval Office,

4:24

but they were recordings of meetings that

4:27

he had with his comrades sometimes five

4:29

or six people. In the room

4:31

sometimes it is full cabinet. but

4:33

yes his leadership groups that he

4:35

debated issues. I mean debate. Is

4:38

it was a dictatorship I'm hardly anyone

4:40

ever interrupted him but he he talked

4:42

a lot and he he was in

4:44

the and i discovered. Near

4:46

he had charisma and he was

4:48

with people who didn't threaten him.

4:50

He could be relatively easy to

4:53

be around in Arabic I presume

4:55

to stave say out there were

4:57

in their in Arabic and they

4:59

were captured by the United States

5:01

after the invasion and they were

5:03

initially her transported to Qatar where

5:05

they were kept in a warehouse.

5:07

And they were translated for. or

5:10

whether or not there was any

5:12

information And them, pike, where's that,

5:14

the Bmd, that sort of thing.

5:16

And once. The. U S realized

5:18

that there was no current intelligence

5:21

value in the tapes, day, began

5:23

to archive them, and some years

5:25

later, they've released some of them

5:27

to a research facility that journalists

5:30

and scholars could access. That lasted

5:32

for a few years and then

5:34

they pull them back and withdrew

5:37

them from the public. and they

5:39

haven't been available since about twenty

5:41

system. So that was why I'm

5:43

with the help of the reporters

5:46

committee. I had it, Sue. Under

5:48

foyer to run to get a big

5:50

chunk of them. You describe

5:52

the U S relationship with Saddam

5:54

during the Iran Iraq War.

5:56

Washington was mostly on his side,

5:59

right? In the, the Reagan

6:01

Administration was monitoring the war after

6:03

it sort of bogged down, and

6:05

in Nineteen Eighty Two, they became

6:07

frightened that Iran was going to

6:10

break through Iraq he lines and

6:12

go straight into Baghdad and overthrow

6:14

Saddam. Now, at this point, Ayatollah

6:16

Khomeini was firmly in charge. We'd

6:18

had the hostage crisis and D.

6:21

Clerical. Regime and Tehran was You're

6:23

making a living out his death

6:25

to America. and so. They.

6:27

Were is. There was a fear

6:29

that if Iran won the war,

6:31

overthrew Saddam and took control of

6:33

Iraq, that and already threatening revolution

6:35

will only become larger and more

6:37

powerful. And so there's dislike. The

6:39

beginning of one of the early

6:41

chapters to the book, my Cia

6:43

officer is dispatched in a private

6:45

jet belonging to the King of

6:48

Jordan into Baghdad more or less

6:50

on announced and he brings with

6:52

him satellite photographs of the battle

6:54

lines that only the United States

6:56

can generate in those. Days cause we

6:58

had kind of a monopoly on I

7:00

in the Sky technologies and he brings

7:02

them insisted arms regime and he says

7:04

look, we're here to help you. Not.

7:06

Lose This war. I know you don't like

7:09

us. You know we have our doubts about

7:11

you, but we have a mutual interest which

7:13

is we want you to stay on from

7:16

against Ayatollah. Answer you to do that. You

7:18

gotta look at these pictures. These guys are

7:20

about to come through in debt. You and

7:22

so a relationship. Began. Sand

7:25

and lasted right through the eighties

7:27

based on the U providing secret

7:29

intelligence to Saddam to help him.

7:32

Out prosecutors war against Iran and job

7:34

denying all the time. We denied all

7:36

the time that we're doing in such

7:38

the. That we did

7:40

it because the United States or Iran

7:43

as containers That but as you recount

7:45

in the book the U was also

7:47

playing a kind of double game is

7:49

effort assess get it is and in

7:51

fact Saddam was always suspicious of these

7:54

gifts that to see I was bringing

7:56

him he would say we can see

7:58

now and his tapes you. say to

8:00

his advisors, you know, I don't trust these guys. And I'll

8:02

bet you that either of

8:04

these photographs are doctored somehow

8:06

to cause us disadvantage, or

8:08

they're delivering the same photographs

8:11

to the Iranians. And he

8:13

started to get wind of evidence

8:16

that the Iranians were acquiring spare

8:18

parts and military supplies, that the

8:20

Israelis were involved. And

8:22

he starts talking about it with his

8:25

comrades. And he sounds like he's

8:28

a little paranoid. Well, then in November

8:30

1986, as listeners

8:33

of a certain age will recall, the

8:35

then Attorney General Edward Mies,

8:38

Edmond Mies, one of those,

8:41

held a press conference in which he

8:43

essentially announced the Iran-Contra scandal, the essence

8:45

of which on the

8:47

Iran side was that the Reagan

8:49

administration had decided to secretly join

8:52

with Israel to sell military equipment

8:54

to Iran so that

8:56

they could succeed against Iraq, playing

8:59

exactly the double game that Saddam suspected.

9:01

And there are these amazing tapes right

9:03

after that scandal is revealed where Saddam

9:05

is saying to his comrades, see, he's

9:07

the least surprised leader in the world.

9:09

Everybody else is shocked by this. He's

9:11

like, I told you this was going

9:13

on. I told you this was the

9:15

way the world works. And

9:17

in his deeply

9:20

felt anti-Semitism and racism towards Jews and

9:23

the state of Israel, he starts just

9:25

ranting on on one of these tapes.

9:28

Zionism, my comrades. How many times do

9:30

I have to tell you that's what controls the

9:32

world? And anyway, that

9:36

revelation undid all

9:38

of the efforts to stabilize

9:40

the relationship between the US

9:42

and Saddam that had been

9:44

undertaken starting in 82. And

9:47

it's interesting on the tapes. Many years later,

9:50

when everybody else has more or less

9:52

forgotten about Iran-Contra, when Saddam was trying

9:54

to explain his hostility toward the United

9:57

States to his colleagues,

9:59

he He refers back to

10:01

it. He says, you know that conspiracy that

10:03

was revealed that I predicted and that I

10:05

told you would Was

10:09

was embedded in our

10:11

relationship with the Americans It's

10:13

still going on that conspiracy will never

10:15

rest and that shaped his view of

10:18

the United States right up until the

10:20

invasion So on the Iran portion of

10:22

the Iran-Contra scandal Did

10:24

President Reagan just want those two

10:26

hostile to the United States countries

10:28

around in Iraq? To

10:30

destroy each other's international strength as

10:32

much as possible. So he funded

10:34

both well Saddam

10:37

certainly thought so and Henry

10:39

Kissinger gave him reason to entertain

10:41

that idea by quipping at some

10:43

circumstance or another around the

10:46

time that CIA was just opening its

10:48

liaison with Saddam that it

10:51

was a shame that both sides couldn't lose the war

10:53

and Saddam

10:55

and his especially after Iran-Contra

10:57

was revealed He

10:59

continued to accept aid from the United

11:02

States for a couple more years and

11:06

there are these scenes where US intelligence

11:09

officers would meet with their Iraqi

11:11

counterparts and The Iraqis would

11:13

open the meeting by saying so your your

11:15

colleague is in Tehran right now sharing these

11:18

same photographs with them right and that was

11:20

the tenor of the suspicion somehow

11:22

the material was good enough and Confirmable

11:25

and reliable enough that the Iraqis

11:27

continued to want it. But

11:30

this so

11:34

in fact Iran-Contra was

11:36

a one-off

11:38

hair-brained failure in

11:40

Reagan foreign policy It was

11:43

a scheme to release hostages and

11:45

perhaps build relations with non-existent moderates

11:48

in the hominy regime But

11:51

the idea that the United States was

11:53

capable of such incompetence Would

11:55

never have occurred to him. It was all part

11:57

of a big master plan that was all in

12:00

at him. As you describe in

12:02

the book, one would

12:04

have thought that George H. W. Bush

12:06

would be the most qualified possible president

12:09

to deal smartly with Saddam Hussein. Bush

12:11

had been Reagan's vice president for eight

12:13

years. He had been UN ambassador.

12:15

He had been the CIA director,

12:18

for heaven's sake. But did

12:20

we have two generations of

12:22

President George Bush's who thought

12:24

they knew Saddam Hussein's brain

12:26

but really didn't? Yeah,

12:30

it's a nice way to ask the question. Look,

12:33

George H. W. Bush was a highly

12:35

qualified foreign policy president. When you watch

12:37

him doing his job with Saddam in

12:39

the run-up to Kuwait, I

12:43

felt a little sorry for him because he

12:45

was doing what you sort of want your

12:47

president to do. He was picking up the

12:49

phone and talking to everybody who knew Saddam

12:52

and asking them how he should interpret

12:54

what Saddam was doing. Part of

12:56

the problem was he got just really bad

12:59

advice from King Hussein of Jordan, from

13:02

Hosni Mubarak in

13:04

Egypt, from King Fad in Saudi

13:06

Arabia. Everybody who really

13:08

lived with Saddam, who were threatened

13:11

by Saddam and who were trying

13:13

to interpret his bluff,

13:16

they all told Bush, don't worry about

13:18

it. We got this. It's just a

13:21

show. The Kuwaitis are going to pay him off.

13:23

Nothing is going to happen. Every time

13:25

Bush would say, are you sure? Maybe

13:27

we should do some military exercises. They

13:30

would say, really, George, we've

13:32

got this. You want

13:34

your presidents to take

13:36

advice from allies

13:39

and regional experts, but in this

13:41

case, they had it all wrong.

13:43

It cost them as much

13:45

as it cost the Americans eventually.

13:49

Going ahead to the second Iraq

13:51

War, would it be accurate to

13:54

say that one thing you learned from

13:56

the tapes was that Saddam never thought

13:58

the United States would invade the United States? in

14:00

2003 despite everything that George W. Bush

14:02

said and did to prepare for a

14:04

war? Yeah, that was

14:06

part of his Achilles trap metaphor

14:08

was that he believed based on

14:10

his experience during the 90s that

14:13

the United States was never going to take

14:16

the risks to its own soldiers

14:18

to its own population by invading

14:20

on the ground. He had

14:22

been you know targeted with

14:25

cruise missile strikes, periodic bombings,

14:27

all very precise and

14:29

calibrated and so he had concluded that the

14:31

United States was casualty averse and that it

14:33

had an Achilles heel as he said in

14:35

a speech which was that

14:37

it just wasn't as muscular as

14:40

it appeared to be and there was

14:43

another factor leading up to 2003 the period between 9-11

14:45

and 2003 is absolutely

14:49

fascinating and the new materials

14:52

are I found them of course

14:54

I'm very excited about this stuff but I found

14:56

him absolutely stunning. He

14:58

had he was in his

15:00

60s now and he was no longer the

15:03

person that he had been in 1990 or 1980. He had become

15:08

obsessed with novel writing. He was spending

15:10

many hours a day handwriting

15:13

his four novels and

15:15

he had kind of lost interest in military

15:17

affairs between that and his complacency that the

15:19

Americans would never come in on the ground.

15:22

He was very so and he also became you

15:25

know sort of an annoying pundit

15:27

after 9-11 just bloviating

15:30

all of the time about America

15:33

and got what it deserved and

15:35

so on completely oblivious

15:37

to the idea that he was vulnerable to

15:40

the aftermath of 9-11 and of

15:43

course he was innocent of ties

15:45

with Al-Qaeda so when those accusations

15:47

came he was just nonplussed

15:49

by them and visitors would come through and he'd

15:51

say you know of course they're saying this stuff

15:54

because they're always out to get me but they're

15:56

not going to invade and he was very

15:59

late to recognize that

16:01

George W. Bush was

16:03

in fact intended

16:05

to invade and

16:07

that he wasn't afraid of the potential casualties

16:10

that the invading force went through.

16:13

So you also wrote an article in The New

16:15

Yorker in December about

16:18

how temporary cease fires don't

16:20

end wars because they

16:22

don't resolve underlying issues. According to the

16:24

news this morning we may be on

16:26

the verge of another temporary cease fire

16:28

in Gaza. Does your deep

16:30

knowledge of the region from decades of

16:33

reporting suggest to you how this might

16:35

actually resolve? Yeah,

16:40

that finding was a political

16:43

science finding, a study of hundreds

16:45

of civil conflicts in the last

16:47

20 years and these

16:50

political scientists demonstrated

16:52

I think pretty convincingly that

16:54

temporary cease fires and prisoner

16:56

exchanges don't correlate with

16:58

the end of conflicts because they don't

17:00

resolve the underlying issues. So if you

17:02

apply that to Israel and Gaza the

17:06

underlying issues are about territory,

17:09

Palestinian sovereignty, the

17:12

history, the search for

17:14

justice by Palestinians, the

17:16

search for security by Israelis, big

17:20

subjects that have been at

17:23

the center of international attention for decades

17:25

and are still unresolved. So what's

17:29

different this time and the reason I took

17:31

a deep sigh when I realized the

17:33

depth of your question is that these

17:37

circumstances both in Israel and

17:39

in Gaza are without precedent.

17:41

So how

17:45

the search for a Palestinian state

17:48

can be pursued in the

17:50

aftermath of this devastating

17:52

war is just

17:55

unclear to me. I think there was a period in

17:57

the fall where there was a lot of Sort

18:00

of easy. Kind of clarity were

18:02

optimism among professional diplomats and you want

18:04

is makers to do their work and

18:06

they only have so much to work

18:08

with your but it was well we're

18:11

going to. We're. Going to find

18:13

a way out of this through

18:15

a two state solution that is

18:18

reinforced by Saudi recognition of Israel

18:20

and a new deal between the

18:22

Us and Saudi Arabia. And somehow

18:25

Gaza will be reconstructed and reimagine

18:27

through that and so on that

18:30

you're in the abstract. on paper,

18:32

it all makes sense, but in

18:34

the reality of what happened both

18:37

inside Israel, to Israeli politics, to

18:39

the Settler movement to an end.

18:42

To the Palestinian population in

18:44

Gaza now literally decimated. Tense

18:47

cause the prewar population are

18:50

more dead. And.

18:52

To. Construct such an abstract formula

18:54

just seems like. It's

18:57

just unrealistic. So I saw.

19:00

This. Time around, I would

19:02

tend to say that ceasefire,

19:05

a prolonged ceasefire, an end

19:07

to violence is necessary. Not

19:09

because it's going to lead

19:12

to a permanent solution Because.

19:16

Something has to change and

19:18

a can't change and co

19:20

pilot? Libidinous. Certainly rolling the

19:22

dice on his scenario as

19:24

it's been reported. This

19:27

temporary cease fire? Maybe because both

19:29

sides are exhausted? I don't know.

19:33

Will lead to a grand bargain

19:35

that includes a Palestinian state and

19:38

other Arab states getting involved in

19:40

helping. To create

19:42

a piece and and source a

19:45

piece. It is so complicated, but

19:47

you know an article. In. vox

19:49

recently said and is kind of relates

19:51

back to your bus that this war

19:53

may become an even bigger history defining

19:56

event for the middle east and the

19:58

u s relationship with that then

20:01

the Iraq War, a real era-defining

20:03

event, considering the massive Gaza death

20:05

toll and destruction of the territory.

20:08

Having just written a book on the Iraq War,

20:10

can you compare and contrast from a sort of

20:14

regional but also US relationship

20:16

standpoint? I think there are

20:19

both huge

20:21

convulsions in the course of American

20:23

foreign policy and in

20:25

the course of the Middle East. The

20:29

difference, obviously, is that in Iraq,

20:33

we sent soldiers into harm's way.

20:36

They became entangled in an impossible

20:39

insurgency. We lost thousands

20:42

of lives, several thousand lives, and then 20,000

20:45

wounded in coming home with

20:49

traumatic brain injury and lost

20:52

limbs, returning to communities. And

20:55

I think changing American politics, I

20:57

think the Iraq War changed American

20:59

politics because our voluntary army saw

21:02

the hubris and

21:06

the errors of their elites

21:08

and came back to America and

21:12

developed a politics of

21:15

anger and change that

21:20

we've been living with gradually since 2016.

21:24

So I think that

21:26

impact is distinct for the

21:28

United States. God

21:31

willing, we won't be going

21:33

to war over the current

21:35

conflict. But I think for

21:37

Israel and for

21:39

Palestine, the war is at

21:42

least as disruptive as the

21:45

Iraq War was for us. Steve

21:47

Call's new book is

21:50

The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein,

21:52

the CIA, and the Origins

21:54

of America's Invasion of Iraq.

21:57

Thanks So much for coming on and sharing it with

21:59

us, Steve. Brian

22:07

Lehrer a Daily Politics podcast is

22:09

an excerpt from I Life Daily

22:11

Radio Show The Brain or Show

22:13

on W N Y C Radio

22:15

Ten Am to Noon Eastern Time

22:17

If you want listen laws at

22:19

W N Y si.org Thanks for

22:21

listening today, Phoenix.