"**SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2024** **A BEST BOOK OF 2024 BY THE NEW YORKER** From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Ghost Wars, the inside story of America s long and ruinous relationship with Saddam Hussein The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power and geopolitics that led to America s disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America s fundamental miscalculations during its ruinous, decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Beginning with Saddam s rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq s secret nuclear weapons programme, Steve Coll traces Saddam s motives through understanding his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists, family members and generals who had no choice but to defer to their leader - a leader directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the torture or imprisonment of many more. This was a man whose reasoning was impossible to reduce to a simple explanation, and the CIA and successive presidential administrations failed to grasp critical nuances in his paranoia, resentments and inconsistencies - even when the stakes were incredibly high. Using unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving participants, and Saddam s own transcripts and audio files, The Achilles Trap is a remarkable picture of a dictator who was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly. A work of great historical significance, it is the definitive account of how corruptions of power, lies of diplomacy and vanity - on both sides - led to avoidable errors of statecraft: ones that would enact immeasurable human suffering and forever change our political landscape."
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