As he reached his early sixties, Saddam decided to write a novel. He had an elegant hand, his Arabic calligraphy laced with long lines. He might produce ten or thirty or even fifty handwritten pages a day. Starting in the late 1990s, his pages arrived by courier at the office of his press secretary, Ali Abdullah Salman, who worked initially inside the Republican Palace and later in a nearby villa. About half a dozen editors and translators worked with Salman. They rarely saw the president. By this time, Saddam visited the official seat of his presidency infrequently, and his editorial aides had no idea where he drafted his fiction. Before, the press team had produced releases of Saddam’s speeches for the Iraqi media or translated foreign news for the president. Once the fiction started coming in, they rallied around a new priority.
Salman did most of the copyediting. It was a delicate task, given the sensitivities of writers generally and the potential penalties for offending this one. He marked up Saddam’s manuscripts with proposed corrections of syntax and grammar, then passed them back. Saddam wrote the same way that he spoke: His sentences were long and twisting. He would start out with one line of observation, disrupt himself with a digression, and then strike off in a new direction. “Even when he tackled simple ideas, he couldn’t help himself and used a complex style,” recalled Saman Abdul Majid, the translator, who was based in the press office. “He would get lost in parenthetical phrases.” His asides included Arabic proverbs and, increasingly, Quranic verses. Saddam would accept only some of the changes proposed by his editors. “He did like to have his own personal touch,” even if this meant writing in a meandering way, Saman Majid recalled. The president would return a second draft for typing and sometimes asked his editors to check historical facts in the text.[1]
The more he wrote, the more he identified as a man of letters. 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.[2]
Saddam’s first completed work, Zabiba and the King, published in 2000, is a polemical allegory set in ancient Babylon. It recounts a love affair between a married king—transparently Saddam—and Zabiba, a young, beautiful, and wise woman who is a stand-in for the Iraqi people. Much of the novel consists of didactic dialogue. Zabiba educates the king on how to rule even more successfully than he already does. The king, as he falls in love with her, takes in her advice respectfully.
The king protects Zabiba from her rapist husband (the United States), and she saves him from an assassination attempt by treasonous relatives. At one point, they discuss the chronic problem of hidden plots. In a recommendation familiar to readers living under Baath Party justice, she proposes a wide crackdown: “I would ask you to arrest all who knew about the preparation of the assassination and did not warn you about it, as well as all those who may have taken part.”
Another time, they discuss succession. The passage echoes Saddam’s claim that he would only appoint a relative to follow him in power if the individual had merit and won the consent of the Baath Party. “Why do we think that the king’s son is any better than a son of a common man?” Zabiba asks. They agree that a son should rule only if he is fully qualified—a tentative, indirect endorsement of Qusay.
At the novel’s conclusion, a people’s council debates about what sort of ruler should follow the king. “We do not want our children and ourselves to be under the rule of some madman from among the children or grandchildren of this king, do we?” one representative asks, to laughter and applause. As it deliberates inconclusively, the council goes on to banish a Jewish citizen from the country, celebrate the army, and shower curses on “those who had gained their fortunes at the expense of the people.”[3]
Writing became a preoccupation as Saddam spent more time in relative isolation following the near-fatal assassination attempt against Uday. In 1998, Saddam ordered a poet who worked in the press office to tutor him for a month on the rules of poetry. Verse had deep roots and visibility in Iraqi and Arab culture, yet while Saddam did compose some poems, he seemed more attracted to the novel, a form suitable for direct propaganda. (Muammar Qaddafi had published a collection of short stories in 1993, so perhaps Saddam thought his lengthy novels would establish his superior credentials.) Crude and awkward as his allegories were, his writing did offer the private joy of composition, as Saddam worked through creative choices about how to render as literary types the dramatis personae of Baathist Iraq—devilish America, the wayward Kurds, despicable landowners. He weaved these allegorical figures into stories of love and war. Saman Majid came to think of his novel writing as “Saddam’s secret garden.”[4]
Saddam saw the novel—as well as poetry, journalism, and the short story—as instruments of national and Baathist propaganda. During the Iran-Iraq War, his regime produced more than seventy-five novels and ninety book-length collections of short stories authored by writers backed by the Baathist state. (The potboiled plots described Iraqi heroism and noble martyrdom against the Persian enemy.) When Saddam took up his own novel writing, he revived the official propaganda novel. He did not put his name on his published novels. Each cover states only that the book within was written “by its author.” But speculation at the time by at least one C.I.A. analyst that the books were ghostwritten was incorrect. Saddam’s decision to keep his name off book jackets was intended to reinforce the self-portrait of a humble ruler in Zabiba and the King.
For that novel, he approved cover art depicting a young woman with flowing hair in an idealized setting—an image lifted without license from the work of a Canadian artist. When the book came out in 2000, there was no confusion in Iraq about who had authored it. The Ministry of Culture printed thousands of copies, and Iraqi reviewers showered the novel with praise. Saddam’s office ordered that copies be handed out to members of visiting foreign delegations. The Iraqi National Theater staged Zabiba as a musical, which Saddam attended, and a twenty-part adaptation eventually aired on Iraqi television.[5]
Saddam soon turned to his second novel, The Fortified Castle, an epic of seven hundred pages—twice as long as any of his other novels. It is set during the American-led war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Sabah, a Sunni Arab veteran of Iraq’s war with Iran, falls in love with Shatrin, a Kurdish woman from the North. Their union is shadowed by Iran, Israel, America, and Britain. The novel’s “long-winded stressing and re-stressing of the unity of Iraq and its people,” in the scholar Hawraa Al-Hassan’s description, makes for a “particularly boring and repetitive read.” More than his other novels, The Fortified Castle reads like the mass-produced official novels of the 1980s, with “its extreme zeal and the intensity of its emotions,” and especially in its “love of the nation and hatred of its enemies,” Hassan writes. Saddam was hardly the first writer to misfire by overindulging himself in his second attempt at a novel, but he was, of course, spared any criticism by domestic reviewers. As with his other releases, every department of government was urged to “order in bulk,” Ala Bashir, Saddam’s physician, recalled.[6]
Saddam increasingly acted as writer in chief. He oversaw a patronage system of novel writers and poets that assured a steady living for those willing to follow the regime line. The program grouped writers into three tiers and allocated stipends accordingly—more than five million dinars for books written by the top group, according to one internal account. A subsidized program through April 2001 involved commissions to eighty writers of “novels, stories and scripts, who were honored by meeting with the President.” A committee of readers evaluated the work for how it “addressed the heroism of the people and the armed forces. . . . Linguistic ability and style were also considered.” In addition, Saddam paid between $100 and $500 to poets who adulated him.[7]
Saddam’s literary period coincided with changes in his inner political circle. After the expulsion of U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998, the America watchers Tariq Aziz and Nizar Hamdoon lost out. Aziz remained deputy prime minister, but at one point, the regime arrested his son, Zia, a businessman, a signal that his opponents had gained ground. In 1998, Hamdoon was recalled from New York to Baghdad to fill a post running the America desk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Aziz and Hamdoon still searched for ways to establish dialogue with Washington, but in meetings with interlocutors such as Samir Vincent, Aziz could now sound as frustrated and insouciant as his boss. “The U.S. cannot hurt Iraq anymore,” he said, echoing a line Saddam sometimes used. “The U.S. has done their best with sanctions and failed.” The allegations about Iraq’s supposedly ongoing WMD programs were “a big lie,” Aziz continued. “The problem with the U.S. is they invent events or facts . . . then turn around and believe their own invention.”[8]
The most powerful individual around Saddam now was Abid Hamid Mahmud, a cousin and former bodyguard of Saddam’s who was in his forties. He served as secretary of the presidential office, but through his informal power, he had come to occupy a position comparable to the one vacated by Hussein Kamel. Mahmud was a tennis and karate enthusiast, a trusted Tikriti who worked twelve hours a day to enforce Saddam’s priorities and execute projects efficiently. He had “a hard and strict appearance,” Saman Majid recalled, and he “wouldn’t tolerate one mistake. Just a simple letter filed in the wrong place could trigger his ire.” Mahmud carried a chrome-plated, Soviet-made Tokarev pistol inscribed to him by Qusay. The trust between the bodyguard and the president “was total.”[9]
Saddam Hussein barely figured into the 2000 presidential election contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The vice president and the Texas governor relied on essentially the same talking points: Saddam was a menace, his departure from power was desirable, and he must comply with U.N. disarmament resolutions. Their positions reflected the premises of the Iraq Liberation Act. Gore’s vice presidential running mate, Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, had coauthored the bill. Bush and Gore both seemed content with abstract tough talk, perhaps because each was politically vulnerable on the issue. Bush’s father had left Saddam in power after the Gulf War. The Clinton administration’s record since then had little in it for Gore to brag about, beyond the U.N. disarmament regime no longer in place.
The election came down to a few hundred votes in Florida, and in December, after a weeks-long melee of recounts and lawsuits, the United States Supreme Court, in a 5–4 ruling, delivered the White House to Bush. Gore conceded graciously. The new president knew that he would have to review Iraq policy early on, but he had more questions than firm plans. Bush could expect plenty of advice from the heavyweights in his national security cabinet. The president appointed a secretary of state, Colin Powell, who had supervised the war to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. He appointed a secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who had parlayed with Saddam as an envoy of the Reagan administration. Dick Cheney, the vice president, had been defense secretary during the Gulf War and had spent the 1990s as chief executive of Halliburton, an oil-services corporation active in the Middle East. For deputy secretary of defense, Bush appointed Paul Wolfowitz, a visible neoconservative who wanted the U.S. to back a new version of Ahmad Chalabi’s “rolling insurgency” plan to overthrow Saddam.
Bush inherited from Clinton the no-fly zone military operations over northern and southern Iraq, as well as a close ally in that endeavor, British prime minister Tony Blair. During the year before Bush arrived at the White House, American and British pilots had entered Iraqi airspace about ten thousand times. They had often been fired upon and had retaliated by firing hundreds of missiles and bombs at Iraqi targets. They had managed to avoid any losses of planes or pilots, but Bush feared that Saddam would get lucky and down a pilot. On February 5, 2001, during Bush’s third week in the White House, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, ran a “principals” meeting—a subcabinet group involved in national security—attended by Powell and Rumsfeld. She asked for a thorough review of the no-fly zones, including of how the administration might prepare in advance to rescue a downed aviator.[10]
On February 23, Bush hosted Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, at Camp David, the wooded presidential retreat in Maryland’s foothills. “I wasn’t sure what to expect from Tony,” Bush recalled. “I knew he was a left-of-center Labour Party prime minister and a close friend of Bill Clinton’s. I quickly found he was candid, friendly, and engaging.” The prime minister and his wife exuded no “stuffiness,” an impression ratified by their willingness one evening to watch Meet the Parents, a middlebrow comedy starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller.[11]
When they got down to business, Bush told Blair that he wanted to develop “a realistic policy on Iraq.” He said he was very concerned that “our Arab friends” thought that “our policy is just not working, but that the sanctions are hurting children.”
Bush had invited Colin Powell to the retreat but not Cheney or Rumsfeld. He asked his chief diplomat to sum up. “For the past ten years, our policy has consisted of the sanctions regime, the no-fly zones, and efforts at regime change in Iraq,” Powell began. Rather than denounce the Clinton administration’s efforts, he praised them: “As a result, Iraq is no longer a danger to the region in the way it was ten years ago,” Powell said.
“But there are problems,” he continued. “Saddam is still there. And he is using his oil wealth not to benefit his people but to develop weapons of mass destruction.” Powell then pitched his main recommendation to Bush: “smart sanctions,” meaning a reformed policy to more precisely restrict trade relevant to WMD but one that would not hurt “children and people generally.” He added, “We do not regard a military option as the best approach, [but] we reserve the right to act, even unilaterally.”
“This seems like a sensible approach,” Blair said. Presumably that was because it closely resembled the policies Blair and Clinton had been coordinating since 1998, with the modest wrinkle that Powell wanted to change how sanctions worked.
“We should also try to isolate Saddam, make him less of an actor on the world stage,” Bush said. “If we could, the Middle East would be more moderate.”[12]
For Saddam Hussein, the headline from the 2000 election was easy to identify: the Bushes were back. “We have to make it clear that a connection exists between the new American president and the interests of the entities—the oil companies,” he told advisers. The oil-rich kingdoms neighboring Iraq “lean more toward Bush’s family, especially the Saudis,” he said.
“The Republican Party and the Bush family are closer to the oil companies,” Tariq Aziz agreed.[13]
Yet Saddam saw no reason to change his policies. His spies at the Mukhabarat sent him a detailed analysis that spring of 2001. It suggested that Saddam faced no immediate threat from the new administration. The paper named Paul Wolfowitz as being “very interested” in action to overthrow Saddam but noted that Wolfowitz’s ideas had served to highlight “the variance in opinions” within Bush’s cabinet. Colin Powell, for example, doubted the Iraqi opposition’s ability to unify.
A second analysis prepared at the training academy of the Iraqi spy service advised that the exiled opposition to Saddam had “lost its credibility” in America and Britain and had “troubles between their members.” This study’s authors took the risky step of listing changes the Baathist regime might consider to strengthen its own legitimacy, such as promoting “political diversity” and a “free press in Iraq.”[14]
Saddam showed no interest in these recommendations. His day-to-day life as president had evolved into a familiar routine. In early February, he joined a cabinet meeting to review an eclectic agenda: the possible revival of a cultural agreement with Nigeria; the unknown health effects of depleted uranium used in bombs and shells fired on Iraq during the 1991 war; and changes to the membership of a commission working on air defense.
At one point, Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, now the minister of defense, mentioned Iraq’s Military Language Institute, a place where, he explained, officers learned “languages that are needed by the Army: English, French, Russian, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew.”
Saddam jumped on the minister: “We do not need our army to expand in preparing people who are fluent in the Iranian or the Turkish language. . . . We do not need to teach the officer in the army the English language. . . . If they have extra time, let them . . . read the history of the Arabic Islamic wars.” Allowing generals and colonels to learn foreign languages would only lead them to betray their country.
Another minister, failing to read the room, suggested they should graduate “big numbers” of Iraqis who could speak Hebrew.
The president was appalled. “We are hostile to the Jew—we do not want to understand what [they] say,” he exclaimed. Iraqis who learned Hebrew would eventually want to “sit down to converse” with a Jewish counterpart, and their shared language would create “a special psychological bridge between them.” This was highly undesirable. The only reason Iraq wanted to understand the Jewish people, Saddam advised his ministers, was to “keep [their] evil away” and to learn how to cause them greater harm.[15]
He continued to work on succession, carefully positioning Qusay as an heir who would meet the Baath Party’s standards for leadership. On May 17, the day Qusay turned thirty-five, Saddam arranged his ascension to the Revolutionary Command Council. In a packed hall next to the Republican Palace, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti watched the coronation. Qusay entered and walked “cheerfully and proudly, as if the gates of history opened wide for him,” Barzan recalled. At a decisive moment, Tariq Aziz rose to say that it was time to give youth a chance. “There was applause and the President did not object,” Barzan later wrote. “There is no one better than Tariq Aziz, the man who makes deals and enjoys doing it.”[16]
That spring and summer of 2001, Saddam received the sorts of B-list foreign visitors he had long entertained. These included mid-level emissaries from Russia, a parliamentarian from Liberia, and Rodrigo Álvarez Cambras, a Havana-based Cuban physician who had once operated on Saddam (to address a spinal issue). A relaxed Saddam steered most conversations to the vexing problem of American power while displaying no particular sense of urgency.
Cambras had brought a box of cigars from Fidel Castro. “The White House is far away from us,” Saddam told him. “What is the nearest city to you?”
“Miami—about one hundred and twenty miles.”
“A lot of weapons might come to Miami,” Saddam remarked. He mentioned the Scud missile attacks he had ordered against Israel during the 1991 war. “We attacked Tel Aviv because it is America’s and Britain’s daughter and whatever hurts Tel Aviv will hurt them, too.”
“Remember, Your Excellency . . . that in 1962, we pointed nuclear rockets [at America], but the Russians took [them] away,” Cambras mentioned.[17]
Emissaries from Moscow carried Saddam a letter from Russian president Vladimir Putin. He sought to rebuild ties with Iraq after Russia’s tilt to the West during the Yeltsin years. “Tell President Putin that Baghdad is stable, and the situation is good,” Saddam said. “America wants Russia to be weak . . . and what we want is for Russia to be strong. . . . Tell him that we will not surrender to America and that we will keep on fighting them.”[18]
Between meetings, Saddam worked on his autobiographical third novel, Men and a City, a project of introspection and legacy-building. In contrast to the progressive, even feminist tropes of Zabiba, the rural social setting in Men and a City is deeply conservative. “There is a strong element of nostalgia in an old Saddam looking back on his childhood,” Hawraa Al-Hassan observes. He seemed conscious now that more of his life lay behind him than ahead.[19]
On July 27, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld sent a memo to Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell seeking a subcabinet meeting on Iraq. Saddam “appears to believe he is getting stronger,” Rumsfeld wrote, and seems to be “riding higher than a year ago.” He reviewed options for the no-fly zones, which came down to doing less or becoming more aggressive. But he also wanted to talk again about “the broader subject of Iraq.” He laid out three possible courses.
First, the U.S. could “roll up its tents and end the no-fly zones before someone is killed or captured,” he wrote. Then the administration could figure out a “way to keep an eye on Saddam Hussein’s aggressiveness against his neighbors from a distance.” Rumsfeld argued indirectly against this option, asserting that “within a few years” the U.S. would “undoubtedly have to confront a Saddam armed with nuclear weapons.”
Another option was to approach “our moderate Arab friends” and see if they might be “willing to engage in a more robust policy.” He noted that “the risks of a serious regime-change policy” had to be weighed against the danger of an “increasingly bold and nuclear-armed Saddam in the near future.”
Finally, Rumsfeld laid out a third possibility, one that obviously intrigued him: they could talk to Saddam. “He has his own interests,” Rumsfeld observed. “It may be that, for whatever reason, at his stage in life, he might prefer to not have the hostility of the United States and the West and might be willing to make some accommodation.”
He admitted that such an initiative “would be an astonishing departure” for the U.S., “although I did it for President Reagan [in] the mid-1980s. It would win praise from certain quarters, but might cause friends, especially those in the region, to question our strength, steadiness and judgment.” Still, Rumsfeld went on, “there ought to be a way” for the U.S. to avoid simultaneous conflict with Iraq and Iran “when the two of them do not like each other.”
Rumsfeld’s instinct that Saddam might have reached a “stage in life” when dialogue could be useful was sound. The Iraqi president had not softened about America, but he was clearly interested in talking, and the outlines of a deal—restoration of weapons monitoring, some version of smart sanctions, the resumption of business ties—was not impossible to imagine. “It is possible that Saddam’s options will increase with time, while ours could decrease,” Rumsfeld wrote.[20]
But the White House was not geared up to make hard decisions about Iraq policy that summer. Four days later, Rumsfeld allowed his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to present “A Liberation Strategy” to the White House. Wolfowitz argued for a U.S. military–backed safe haven in southern Iraq where Ahmad Chalabi could organize an insurgency against Saddam. Rumsfeld’s management style—allowing a subordinate to advocate for a proposal that could draw the Pentagon into a war while keeping his own distance and privately offering options for diplomacy—did nothing to clarify where the Bush administration was heading. By the end of August 2001, Rumsfeld conceded later, “U.S. policy remained essentially what it had been at the end of the Clinton administration—adrift.”[21]
At the C.I.A., the Iraq Operations Group, a.k.a. “the No Operations Group,” remained what it had been since the late 1990s, too—a shell of a unit on the sixth floor of the Original Headquarters Building where some officers went to retire on the job. By the late summer of 2001, the I.O.G. comprised just eighteen people, including administrative assistants, name tracers, and report-writing officers. There was but a single fully trained case officer. The C.I.A. had two reporting sources remaining inside Iraq. One could only communicate by mailing letters to an accommodation address in the Arab world, meaning that his information was often two or three months out of date by the time the C.I.A. absorbed it. Cable traffic through the I.O.G. totaled several hundred cables daily, but the great majority came from the eavesdropping National Security Agency, which swept up and distributed all sorts of raw intercepts that were hard to make much use of without being inside Iraq. There were perhaps twenty cables of varying significance to review each day—by C.I.A. standards, a modest flow. The small agency teams that had earlier rotated into Kurdistan had been shut down after the disasters of 1996. Thereafter, the group’s mission, as one of its leaders explained to a job applicant, became to “make sure the words ‘C.I.A.,’ ‘Iraq,’ and ‘fiasco’ don’t appear on the front page of The New York Times.”[22]
That summer, Charles Duelfer, former deputy head of U.N. weapons inspections, attended a closed-door C.I.A. conference about Iraq. During the 1990s, Duelfer had probably spent more time in Baghdad than any other American with official duties. He had never met Saddam, but he had spent countless hours with Tariq Aziz and Iraqi scientists. At the conference, the discussion turned to the subject of Jafar Dhia Jafar. The C.I.A. apparently didn’t know where he was working anymore. The talk turned to “lots of very technical ideas” to track Jafar down, including “sensors on satellites, communications-intercept techniques, new widgets on the ground.”
Duelfer intervened: “Why not just call him up? His former wife is probably in the U.K., and you could ask for her number.” He mentioned Jafar’s wealthy brother, Hamid, who ran a trading firm with offices in the United Arab Emirates. “Ask him,” Duelfer suggested. “It would be easy to contact him.” The discussion left Duelfer reflecting on the apparent “absence of information” at the C.I.A. “about the internal political and social situation in Iraq.” How could the United States be so far out of touch?[23]
That summer, the position of Iraq Operations Group chief became vacant, and although he was well aware of the unit’s “less than stellar reputation,” Luis Rueda decided he was interested. He was serving on the seventh floor as executive assistant to the C.I.A.’s deputy director, John McLaughlin—a position usually given to officers with leadership potential. By informal tradition, executive assistants who finished their rotations could pick their next jobs, within reason. While staffing McLaughlin, Rueda had noted the frequency of meetings about Iraq convened at the White House. The operations group also intrigued because it was a covert-action shop, however moribund. Within the C.I.A., covert action—under which propaganda and paramilitary operations fell—was a distinct specialty. Most case officers spent their careers recruiting and running foreign spies to collect intelligence. But Rueda, who had joined the C.I.A. in 1981, had spent much of his career in the Latin America Division, where covert action had been more commonplace. During the 1990s, Rueda had worked on large-scale covert actions against drug cartels in South America and Mexico, programs that involved multimillion-dollar budgets and “lethal authorities,” meaning instructions from the White House that permitted the C.I.A. to equip agents and allies to attack and use lethal force against certain targets.
“I’m an American because of a failed covert action,” Rueda explained to colleagues. His father had been a member of the anti-Castro Cuban underground at the time of the Bay of Pigs operation—a “fascist of the first order,” as Rueda jokingly called him. At age four, Rueda landed at a refugee camp in Miami. He grew up on Staten Island, endured a strict Catholic education, and joined the C.I.A. as a case officer in 1981. Two decades later, he had grown into a balding man with a gray goatee. He was humorous and “overly opinionated,” as he would describe himself, although far more liberal than his father.[24]
He got the position. On August 4, 2001, he moved into a sixth-floor office with windows looking out on other windows. He was senior enough to qualify for a wooden desk, as opposed to the metal ones meted out to junior officers. There was a map of Iraq on one wall. As he read into the files, Rueda learned the situation was at least as bad as he had expected. “We had, for all intents and purposes, lost the Kurds as allies,” he recalled, because of the resentments left over from the 1990s. “The only thing that was functioning was Ayad Allawi and his group,” the Iraqi National Accord, which received a “pittance.”
The C.I.A. no longer enjoyed significant support on Iraq from friendly Arab regimes in the region—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan. Generally, they “thought that Saddam was our guy,” meaning that the C.I.A. had deliberately left the Iraqi leader in power as a counter to Iran and was perhaps cooperating with him secretly. “They said, ‘You didn’t kill him, you didn’t overthrow him—ergo, he’s your man. You slapped him for Kuwait, but he’s your man against Iran.’ ” Like Saddam, Arab leaders had difficulty crediting the possibility of American incompetence.[25]
Rueda called John Maguire, who had worked in Amman during the “Mr. Max” years. He was teaching at “the Farm,” the C.I.A.’s Virginia training facility for case officers. Rueda and Maguire had known each other from tours in Central America and had become friends. Maguire had an “obsession” with Iraq operations because of his bitter experiences during the 1990s and the losses endured by Iraqi allies, such as Mohammed Abdullah Shawani, the former Iraqi general whose sons had been executed by Saddam’s regime. Maguire knew the files and the personalities. Rueda asked him to serve as his deputy.
“Can you overthrow Saddam?” John McLaughlin, a career analyst known for boiling complicated questions down to their essence, asked Rueda.
“No,” he said. “Saddam has killed anybody who is a threat to him, so there’s nobody inside that we can tap into. The outside opposition—I mean, nobody knows who they are, they’re discredited.” The C.I.A. might offer to pay somebody $5 million to overthrow Saddam, but if the operation failed, Saddam would take the coupmaker “and drill through his kneecaps, burn him in acid, slaughter his family, wipe out his village, and throw salt onto the ground so nothing grows. I can’t compete with that,” Rueda said.[26]
It followed, then, that the U.S. would have to learn how to contain Saddam, perhaps in part by talking to him again and offering financial or other inducements, as Donald Rumsfeld had suggested. Or the U.S. could continue to isolate Baghdad through coercive sanctions and monitoring, as Clinton had done. The alternative—apart from giving up altogether—would be to order the U.S. military to invade Iraq and depose Saddam, an operation that would require at least tens of thousands of troops. It would also entail incalculable geopolitical risks, huge expense, and possibly heavy casualties.
In August 2001, inside the Iraq Operations Group—and in prosperous, peaceful America at large—it was hard to imagine how such an invasion would come about.