2025 Arthur Ross Book Award Ceremony and Meeting: "The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq”

Join Gideon Rose for the 2025 Arthur Ross Book Award ceremony honoring this year’s medalists: Steve Coll, Jonathan Blitzer, and Sergey Radchenko.

The program will feature the award presentation and a conversation with Steve Coll on the intelligence failures and strategic misjudgments that shaped the origins of America’s invasion of Iraq.

CFR’s annual Arthur Ross Book Award recognizes books that make an outstanding contribution to the understanding of foreign policy or international relations. The prize, endowed by the late Arthur Ross in 2001, is for nonfiction works from the past year, in English or translation, that merit special attention for: bringing forth new information that changes the understanding of events or problems; developing analytical approaches that offer insights into critical issues; or introducing ideas that help resolve foreign policy problems.

 

FROMAN: Good evening, everybody. Welcome. Great to see everybody. Thank you all for being here. It’s a pleasure to welcome you to the twenty-second annual Arthur Ross Book Award Ceremony. We’re pleased to have a full room here and about 200 members or so who are listening in virtually.

We are expecting Arthur’s wife, Janet, to be here—I think she may be running a little bit late—and we’re grateful for the family’s continued involvement in this ceremony and in the Council more generally. Arthur endowed this award in 2001 to honor important works that help us understand, analyze, and resolve key foreign policy questions. He attended Columbia University and went later on to work on Wall Street, and ultimately for a company that is now the Central National-Gottesman. And we’re honored to have several active CFR members from the company, including Ken Wallach, Ed Wachenheim, and others. I think it may be a company that is disproportionately represented in the—in the Council’s membership.

Arthur served in World War II as a lieutenant commander in the Navy, and as a delegate to the United Nations under five presidents. And he was an extraordinary philanthropist, championing the arts, parks and gardens, and big ideas. He was also remarkably humble when it came to giving. He told the New York Times in 1971, “Big I’m not, but I’m interested and I can give some time.” And through his generosity, he gave us a chance to celebrate foreign policy books that really matter, thoughtful works that help us better understand the world around us, including the three award winners tonight.

And so tonight we’ll be honoring Steve Coll for Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq as our Gold Medal winner; Jonathan Blitzer for Everything (sic; Everyone) Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and The Making of a Crisis, our Silver Medal winner; and Sergey Radchenko for To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.

Interestingly, yesterday we had an event here kicking off our America at 250 Program. It was a discussion of a survey of 300 or so historians of American foreign policy who did a survey listing the ten best and the ten worst foreign policy decisions of the last 250 years. And the worst foreign policy decision, according to these 300 or so historians, was the Iraq War. So it’s only fitting that our winner tonight has instantly produced a book to help us understand the decision to invade Iraq. The issues around the—confronting an aggressive Russia, addressing the migration crisis—the subjects of the other two books—are absolutely critical to U.S. foreign policy today as well. And all three books demonstrate the kind of nuance and depth that’s increasingly rare in public discourse today shaped by social media and the need to respond to the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

So we hope you will all take your time to enjoy these books. Congratulations to our three winners, who we’ll be privileged to hear from tonight. And with that, let me turn it over to the intellectually indefatigable Gideon Rose. (Applause.)

ROSE: Welcome, everybody.

There’s a wonderful show on Max called the Pit. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it. The second season just came out. And I was reading an article about it, and it was analyzing its popularity—it’s won all these awards—and it described it as a leading example of what the piece called “competence porn.” And the idea was that in these troubled times we wanted to retreat to a world in which serious, smart, rational, well-intentioned people tried their best to solve real problems, and won more than they lost, and got through the day to go on to the next.

And that—it struck me that this was what the Council offered, competence porn. (Laughter.) We have a vision of a world in which serious, smart people try to do the right thing, and debate how to do it, and try to make the world a little better. We’ve been doing that for a hundred years.

And I realized that’s what I love most about the Arthur Ross Book Award process, because every year I get to spend a decent chunk of time—because these are not thin, little books, and there’s a whole bottom of the iceberg that you don’t see that we have to read and wade through. But you spend time with serious people applying disciplined intelligence to important topics, really trying to teach us something that we didn’t know and say something important and valuable. And I get to debate the relative merits of those outstanding examples of this with a jury of true dedicated professionals. And in this time when we’re supposedly not able to get along, when we’re supposedly not unified, when we’re supposedly not part of a common discussion, the members of the jury—from all political parties, from all race, gender, everything—demography, political views, professional backgrounds, whatever you want—they’re all members of the guild, and they all follow the norms of the guild, and they debate rationally and seriously, and we have different views, and we come to a common set of agreements on what deserved the prizes. And that process, to me, is actually as valuable as the books themselves, because it refreshes my hope that that kind of thing can happen. It’s a kind of competence porn in and of itself.

And I just want to thank the jury members, who are all listed in the program. And actually, I’ll risk calling them out by name because they deserve it: Andrew Ross Sorkin, Lisa Anderson, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sumit Ganguly, Michelle Gavin, Paul Golob, Calvin Sims, and Jose Fernandez. They did a great job, and many of them are here with us tonight. (Applause.)

By the way, people often overinterpret results, because for most people their views on things like what book do you like, you buy a book as an identity badge—oh, this is what I agree with, I am somebody because I bought this person’s book, right? That’s what most of the books—or it’s just sort of trash to wile away and kill time with. And all the members of the jury basically approached these challenges as, how can I actually figure out which ones did a really excellent job at fulfilling their task?

There were seven finalists, and I just want to mention the ones that are not going to get prizes because they’re excellent, too, or else they wouldn’t have been finalists.

Alexander Ward’s The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump is an indispensable source on the foreign policy of the Biden administration. People will be going back to look at that and say, gee, what really happened during the withdrawal from Afghanistan or the early stages of the war in Ukraine, and so forth.

Simon Shuster’s The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky, again, part of a new literature of really good books on the Ukraine conflict. We don’t know how it’s going to end, but we know a hell of a lot more about what’s happening than we did, and it’s thanks to good books like that.

Elizabeth Saunders’ The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace is exactly what it says, an academic study, first-rate IR and foreign policy analysis about how—the role of elites in decision-making.

And with elites for 200, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World would actually be a sort of somewhat uncomfortable and cringey read for many of the people watching this, I imagine, here and online because it talks about the ways—a different look at how elites run the world and make the rules for themselves, but also very interesting.

But the three that get prizes are the ones we’re going to talk about tonight, and they’re really superb. And I want to first call up Sergey Radchenko for To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power. Come on up here, Sergey. (Applause.)

We’re going to talk about the details of the book in a second, but first let me give you your medal of honor. (Applause.) Let’s put it this way. OK. And now we look at them. Great. Take a seat, Sergey.

OK. So this is classic old-school diplomatic history, security studies, archival research—the kind of stuff we leaned in school, we read in school, and that one is deeply glad to see is still being produced today. So kudos to you.

First, specifically, your elevator pitch. What does the book say? For those who might not have read it, what is the argument of the book in a nutshell?

RADCHENKO: So the argument of the book is that the Soviet leaders from the beginning of the Cold War until really the end, and even beyond the Cold War actually—there is connection there to the current state of mind of the people in the Kremlin—valued nothing as much as they valued recognition of their greatness. By who? By the United States, first and foremost. They wanted to be recognized as great leaders of a great power, and much—many of their foreign policy decisions were targeted towards that. So that’s sort of the main thing.

And the second big thing about the book is that I was able to access materials that have previously not been available.

ROSE: OK. I’ll get to the how you got there. Let me stay with the argument for a second: Why is that a different argument than other people have made about this subject?

RADCHENKO: So we when we talk about the Cold War, a lot of people focus on ideology. They look at the struggle between capitalism and communism as a sort of defining characteristic of the Cold War. And they also see the Cold War as this self-contained thing that happened and then it was over with, and then we lived in this beautiful, wonderful new world. And what I argue in the book is that actually ideology, although important, was not as important as the psychological makeup of the Soviet leaders, who were driven by desire to be recognized for their greatness, which mattered much more than, let’s say, ideological prescriptions of Marxism-Leninism. And what’s more interesting as well is that those underlying causes of that—you know, of their behavior, their desire to be recognized—they did not go away with the end of the Cold War but continued, and have continued to the present day.

ROSE: Is that—is your analysis—does it mean that we need to look to the particular characteristics and psychological attributes of these Soviet leaders? In other words, were they particularly concerned with status compared to other kinds of figures? Or is your argument the larger argument, this is what actually drives national leaders?

RADCHENKO: That’s—exactly. The latter thing, I think, is more true. This book is, by the way, as much about China as it is about the Soviet Union. China is a big part of that.

But I would say—

ROSE: China then or China now?

RADCHENKO: China then and China now, exactly, because you see—(laughter)—that Chinese behavior is also driven by that desire to be recognized for their greatness not just by the United States, us today, but back then also by the Soviet Union because they were the younger brother. And actually, this was one of the reasons for the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, because the Soviets were not willing to give this recognition.

But, between the lines, if you read the book carefully you’ll see a critique of American foreign policy there as well, because I find—

ROSE: But we’re never concerned with status, right? (Laughter.)

RADCHENKO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, I don’t say that right in those terms, but I think if you read it carefully that’s exactly what the book says.

ROSE: As you said, this is based on astonishing archival research in Russia and elsewhere. How did you get access to this stuff? Why were you able to do what other scholars have not and be able to mine these untapped gems?

RADCHENKO: A crazy story. I mean, I lived in China for five years. I had probably the best access of any Western scholar to Chinese materials. And actually, this was supposed to be a book about China. I lived in China, collected all these amazing materials on China. None of them are available to anyone. They were not even available back then. Now it’s just not possible to access them at all.

But then, suddenly, the Russians decided to declassify vast troves of their Cold War documentation. And we can come up with all kinds of theories as to why they decided to do that, but for a number of years I was just there sitting in Moscow going through all those personal papers of Soviet leaders, and you know, just the feeling of excitement you get as a historian looking at personal papers of people like Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, understanding the obvious—that actually, they were people before they were leaders. And you can see their psychological makeup, how they were just obsessed with their—they were just, you know, vain people, and obsessed with their prestige, and obsessed about how others saw them, et cetera. And you could see this is where quantity turns to quality. You have all—you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of these materials, you really begin to understand how those people thought.

ROSE: Fabulous. We could talk about this for hours.

One last question: What does this say about contemporary Russia?

RADCHENKO: I think we have to focus on psychology first and foremost, and this is what the book tries to do looking at the individual psychology of leaders. And I still think we have to do that with Putin as well.

If you look at Putin, you would think, you know, you would like to judge, make—you know, talk about national interests and things like that, you know. But in the end, emotion is what matters with people like that. Emotion also matters with Putin. You can see that emotional underpinning in foreign policymaking really directing Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War, and it continues to direct Russian foreign policy today with Putin.

So all of that is just to say that when we look at these people, we have to look at their emotional makeup, at how they imagine the world, how we think about the world, and their role within the world. And that, I think, allows us to have much better and much more nuanced understanding of how they make their foreign policy.

ROSE: Sergey, thank you very much. Read the book, follow his other articles, and learn about what actually happens then and now. Thank you very much.

RADCHENKO: Thank you. (Applause.)

ROSE: Here. You actually—you get this. Sergey, you get this.

Jonathan Blitzer, come on up. OK. Our next prizewinner is Jonathan Blitzer for Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and The Making of a Crisis. Come on up. (Applause.) Good to see you. Hold on one second.

Again, let me give you your medal. I always feel like the guy in The Day of the Jackal with this. (Laughter.) OK, like, if you duck we’re not going to get shot, right? OK.

BLITZER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you.

ROSE: OK. In fact, wait, we’ve got to take our pictures. Great. Excellent. OK.

One of the fun things about this—these books is that they come in different packages, different forms, different types. And you know, you have a sort of serious diplomatic history that is—I’m not going to say dry, but is sober stuff; and you have sober stuff as well, but you have fast-paced, heartrending journalism like this which illuminates a current challenge by bringing the people and bringing the stories to the fore in a way that is indelible and leaves you with a transformed view of the subject.

So congratulations and thanks for an absolutely fascinating book. For those who might not have read it, what is the gist of this book?

BLITZER: This is every author’s nightmare, to just boil it all down quickly. (Laughter.)

This book is about the relationship between the United States and Central America from the 1980s to the present. And the reason I think this particular history is so important is to understand immigration, immigration policy, U.S. foreign policy in the region, and immigration politics in the United States, you have to make sense of essentially what happened over the last decade. Now we’re in kind of a new chapter of the immigration story, the global immigration story in the United States. But for at least a decade, the real central drama at the U.S. southern border had to do with asylum seekers fleeing Central America, three countries in particular in Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. And to understand why so many people from this particular region were showing up at the U.S. southern border, you have to go back to the 1980s. It’s a story that people have lived personally and are still around, and can speak to in very visceral, intensely personal and poignant ways. But it also starts to bring together all of these different facets of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic policy.

So, for instance, in 1980 you have the creation of the 1980 Refugee Act, the first time that refugee and asylum policy were codified in an American statute; very laudable policy outcome that happens to come into existence at the same time that the U.S. is prosecuting the Cold War in the region. And so there’s an immediate geopolitical tension between what the United States wants to do in the region vis-à-vis, you know, limiting the spread of leftism and what it has promised to do in terms of offering people protection. And the kind of original sin of that moment that arises out of that tension is something we very much live with in the present moment.

ROSE: Tell us some of the—tell us about some of the people you meet in this book.

BLITZER: Yeah. I mean—

ROSE: If there are six people you meet in heaven, tell us some of the people you meet in Everybody (sic; Everyone) Who Is Gone Is Here.

BLITZER: You know, the kind of beating heart of the book is a heart surgeon from El Salvador—he’s now in his early seventies—named Juan Romagoza, who is living now in Usulután in eastern El Salvador. And he basically came to the United States after a horrific ordeal in which he was brutally tortured by the military regime in El Salvador, a regime that was backed in really every sense—diplomatically, politically, financially—by the United States. He was brutally tortured, survived this torture. It incapacitated him as a heart surgeon, which is what he had trained to be. And he kind of reoriented himself, and essentially started to concern himself with the idea of collective trauma, and the health implications of that for a whole community that at the time was fleeing El Salvador and Guatemala as regimes backed by the United States were horribly repressing the populations there.

And so Juan comes to the United States after a period of really incredibly compelling advocacy in Mexico and becomes a community leader, first in San Francisco and then eventually in Washington, D.C., where he heads a storied medical clinic that’s still around that caters primarily to undocumented immigrants from Central America called La Clínica del Pueblo. And in the early 2000s, one of the reasons why Juan came to my attention particularly is that he was the named plaintiff in a major human rights trial that took place in Florida in the early 2000s in which two Salvadoran generals who had been relocated by the U.S., both by the CIA and by the State Department to the United States after the—during the war years, stood trial many years later—at that point they were in their, you know, seventies—for human rights abuses during that period. And so Juan testified in an incredibly moving, brave way, and ultimately that led to the deportation of these two war criminals who had been U.S. allies in 2015, these guys basically at a moment when—and this is where all the histories kind of converge—at a moment when, you know, deportations from the United States to Central America were ramping up. Two people who got off one of these planes in San Salvador in 2015 were these notorious war criminals, and Juan’s testimony was central in securing that outcome.

ROSE: You said that after the period the book discusses that not only the dynamics of where in Latin America the immigrants come from or where in the international sphere they come from to get to and go up has changed a little bit. And then in the Trump administration things have changed yet again in terms of differential flows. Are the variables that drove the immigration wave that you document still the variables driving the situation now?

BLITZER: Good question. I mean, specifically, they’ve shifted in many ways. I think the thing that particularly interests me about the history of Central American migration to the United States is that kind of one of the motivating factors of American foreign policy in the ’80s was this idea of needing, of course, to limit the spread of leftism in the region, and to try to create a very stark dividing line between the United States and the wider region. And one of the great ironies on a human level, on a demographic level, on a political level was that that U.S.—that element of U.S. policy, that particular bit of orthodoxy, ended up tying the region much more closely together. And that gave rise to generations of waves of migration from Central America.

Typically, you know, one of the things to me that’s important about the kind of historical legacy of the—of the material that comes up in this book is that, you know, over the years, because of congressional dysfunction, because of a lack of political leadership in dealing with important issues related to immigration and immigration reform, the border itself has become a kind of stand in for the idea of a comprehensive immigration policy. We do not have that. There has been a kind of deadlock in trying to address that issue, although I don’t think it’s a great mystery how we ought to proceed. But the border has become this kind of be-all and end-all symbol for how we even negotiate some of these questions.

And so you fast forward now to the present moment, and you know, during the Biden years, for instance, the preponderant number of people showing up at the U.S. southern border were coming from a country like Venezuela, say, or also reflected a much more international demographic. There was still a significant presence of Central Americans arriving at the southern border, but for a lot of people who were desperate to come to the United States, because of the lack of a—of a thoroughgoing legal immigration system with avenues for people to apply for visas, to reunite with family members, to respond to economic needs, the kind of only door that was left open—and it was a rickety one—was the asylum system, which was never built for this kind of reality.

And so, you know, now we find ourselves in a moment where, OK, arrivals at the southern border are at all-time lows, but nevertheless the current administration’s crackdown on interior—you know, on the interior of the United States is being done in the name of, quote/unquote, “securing the border.” And so we’re kind of trapped in this cycle.

ROSE: Again, there’s so much one could talk about here. Sergey was talking about individuals and their psychology. When you focus on structural factors, it seems like immigration waves are due to these big external forces, and waves go back. And then you look at the sort of Biden years and the Trump years, and you see them super high and then cut down. And it seems, like, oh, they’re much more malleable. They’re much more manipulable and amenable to U.S. policy shifts. Should we come away thinking that this problem is solvable, or that there are inevitable giant migration waves that will happen no matter what?

BLITZER: I think one of the great fictions of American politics is the idea that U.S. border policy can control or shape this demographic inevitability of mass migration, in the region and in the world. And I think what you see from one administration to the next is this desperate belief that if the United States somehow enacts a much harsher border policy, somehow it can communicate this message to people in the world that, you know, the U.S. is not open for business, so to say. And I think this outlook and this approach has backfired every single time. It’s caused immense human suffering. And it’s been counterproductive, really, in almost every way you can imagine.

And so I do think that the immigration question is a resolvable one in a kind of policy sense. The problem always is the political dimension. But I think, you know, there are—to my mind, one of the ways of addressing the so-called problem of mass migration is to acknowledge its inevitability, and to try to create legal avenues to accommodate the reality of people on the move, at a moment when more people are on the move than we’ve seen, essentially, since the Second World War. And, of course, to have a more enlightened U.S. foreign policy, because that impacts the conditions that are driving so many people to leave home in the first place.

ROSE: I hear what you’re saying. To play devil’s advocate, when the Biden administration shifted its policy in the last year, when the Trump administration put new policies in, as you say, border crossings drop. So why isn’t that an example of manipulating a flow, that is a choice that some people might want and some people might not want, but is a possible choice rather than lying back and reconciling yourself to the inevitable?

BLITZER: Well, it’s funny. I mean the Biden administration, because in 2024 it was in the midst of a tough reelection bid, was trying to emphasize the fact that its success at the U.S. southern border owed to the sudden harshness of its policy in the last year. In fact, it was an accumulation of a whole number of policies, some of which the administration itself adopted. So just as a random snapshot example, you know, there were people arriving at the U.S. southern border from four countries in particular—Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. The fact of people leaving these countries had to do with intense, complicated, repressive regimes in each of these places. And it was particularly complicated for U.S. policy because it wasn’t easy for the United States to deport people to those countries because those governments wouldn’t accept deportation flights.

So one of the things the Biden administration did was it created a parole program. There are flaws with this program for a number of reasons, but interestingly, to your question, when they created legal avenues for a certain segment of this population to come to the United States, using routes other than just showing up at the U.S. southern border, the flows dropped by 90 percent from these four countries. Which is just to show you that there’s, like, a much more complicated reality. And then you start to dig in a bit more. And you see that one of the reasons, to my mind, in the last year of the Biden administration, that the numbers dropped had less to do with some of the Biden administration’s attempts to rejigger the asylum system, and more to do with the fact that the diplomatic pressure it was imposing on Mexico had been ramped way up. And that Mexico was actually intercepting large numbers of people, which is something that every administration has done, Democrats and Republicans, going back decades.

It’s indisputable that the message Trump sends is one that people receive in the world. In my experience, and we’ll see what happens in a year or two years’ time, my sense is that the kind of policies of someone like Trump affect people’s tactics but not their underlying desperation. It’s something we saw in the first Trump term. You know, in the early days of the first Trump term the numbers really dropped at the southern border. And by 2019, after some of the harshest—then the harshest policies we’d ever seen at the U.S. southern border, the separation of families and so on, the numbers had reached record highs again. So to my mind, it remains very much to be seen. And I think a kind of single-minded focus just on border policy misses the broader picture.

ROSE: Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who is Gone is Here. Fabulous book. (Applause.)

BLITZER: Thank you so much.

ROSE: Great job.

BLITZER: Thanks. (Applause.)

ROSE: Steve Coll, come on down. Our Gold Prize winner, Steve Coll for The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, and the CIA—Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. Another small topic. (Laughter, applause.)

COLL: Thank you very much.

ROSE: Thank you. Oh, you’re on this side, Steve.

This is a book about not entirely rational leaders doing crazy things on the basis of bad information. And it also talks about Saddam Hussein. (Laughter.) OK. I found this book absolutely terrifying. Well, first, before I—before I explain why this was so disturbing, and why I teach many of the insights from this book, and why it has stayed with me—because my take may be slightly different than some others. But first, why did you feel we needed yet another study of this subject? And what makes this special?

COLL: Well, so I traveled to Baghdad in, I think it was, October 2003, when the Iraq Survey Group was just coming to terms with the fact that there was no WMD. And they were being asked to explain why there was no WMD. And they were starting to interview Iraqi leaders. Saddam was still at large. But from that time forward, I was really interested in the question, why had Saddam sacrificed his power, ultimately his life, his son’s life—sons’ lives, for the sake of weapons that he didn’t possess? Because he had contributed to some of this confusion. And I thought the answer was probably really interesting, but there wasn’t much information. But it turned out later that extraordinary recordings from inside his regime—he tape recorded his leadership conversations as often as Richard Nixon, more often—and also other memos and letters from inside his presidency became available. Complicated story, if you want we can talk. Eventually I had to sue the Pentagon to get a lot of them. But—

ROSE: This was the Iraq Study Group Project, right?

COLL: No, it was another—I can explain it later. It may or may not be of interest. But the materials were available. Then they were withdrawn. Ultimately, with the help of the Committee for—Reporters for Freedom of the Press, as pro bono lawyers, we litigated under FOIA and got them. And that became one of the ways that we were able to—I was able to write about Saddam’s side of the story. And just to finish, my purpose was to try to enlarge our understanding of the origins of the war, because I think what you were referring to in your funny joke, that line of self-deception, and hubris, and, you know, the manipulation of intelligence, is pretty familiar to us. And it’s not to say that it needs to be rewritten over and over again, but that wasn’t my purpose. Was to go was—it was to answer the question with Saddam in the picture, and to think more broadly about the call and response between the United States and Saddam.

So the book opens in 1979. I also did a lot of journalistic, you know, investigative-ish reporting, tracking people down, survivors of Saddam’s regime. I spent a lot of time with the Robert Oppenheimer of their program, who opens on the first page. And so to explain what was real and what was not real, why there was a chemical and nuclear program in the ’80s, and then why, Saddam destroyed it without explaining himself, and then set off a decade more of confusion. The details, I think, are important, but to me there was room to rewrite with Saddam and his perspective in the story.

ROSE: Let me confirm that. This is, as far as I’m concerned—and I’ve written on the subject myself—the best presentation we have to date of what you might call the view from Baghdad. I think, you know, a one-volume survey of the Civil War that was fully objective and fully historically accurate didn’t appear for until a century after the Civil War. James McPherson’s, you know, Battle Cry of Freedom, is generally regarded as the best one-volume Civil War history. And it took a century after the conflict. It may take that long to get a full picture of the entire Iraq War situation, because of how crazy it was. But this is the best picture we have to date of what was happening on the other side of the story. We know a lot about—we’ve discussed a lot about the Washington side.

So let’s talk a little bit about the Iraqi side, and Saddam in particular. By the way, we had a diplomatic history. We had contemporary journalism with a historical bent. And here we have the sort of, like, the hybrid or the synthesis. We have a journalist who has somehow had access to archives of recent contemporary history, and who applies deep historical techniques and journalistic techniques together, with characters that are indelible as well. I think my favorite phrase or incident in the whole book is sort of the nastiness—the general horribleness of the entire Saddam Hussein family, from the uncle Khairallah—do you remember his book type—what was his uncle’s book?

COLL: Something to do with—

ROSE: Three whom God should not have created. (Laughter.) Persians, Flies, and Jews. That was Saddam’s uncle’s book.

COLL: Mmm hmm. And not just his uncle, his political mentor. He pulled him out of Tikrit, brought him to Baghdad, and indoctrinated him into the then-competitive politics of kind of post-royal Baghdad. And he became kind of a gunrunner in the early Baath Party, aspirations to coup making. And so he came up as a hard man in the Baath Party movement, but also influenced by his uncle and the ideas that a lot of pan-Arab nationalism were sort of treating as consensus in those days.

ROSE: Sergey said that they—talked about the Soviet leaders, they were people before they were leaders. Saddam is a person. He was a hitman in his twenties, right?

COLL: He was literally a hitman. He stood outside. He made a great movie—a couple of movies about himself. One called The Long Days. And he hired a director who made one of the Bond movies to come and do the final cut. And the critical scene is when a military dictator, who followed the assassination of the royal family, was driving through the main street of Baghdad in his—I don’t know if it was a Rolls Royce, but it was a proper car. And Saddam and his gang are there to ambush him with machine guns, like Tommy guns. Now, in reality—and Saddam doesn’t hide this—he panicked and shot too early, and kind of screwed up the assault. But in the movie, you have to see—you can see it on YouTube if you’re really interested. But it’s lit in this kind of 1930s John Dillinger sort of way. And he has this Tommy gun. And he just starts shooting, and it never ends.

Anyway, and then lots of other things happened. He’s imprisoned for a while. He escapes. He rides a white horse to the river swims across. And his self-mythologizing is, of course, part of the way that he ruled, and of interest to us now in this age of authoritarianism. But I would just say, as a subject of biography, someone told me once—because after 9/11, as some of you might know, you know, I wrote a lot about Afghanistan and al-Qaida. I had covered those things before 9/11 as a newspaper reporter for the Washington Post, by accident of assignment. So I knew a lot of these subjects before 9/11. When 9/11 happened I was like, oh my God, these are my people. And I wrote about them. And one thing that somebody told me at the time was you should never write a biography of someone you don’t like. And that’s all I’ve ever done. (Laughter.)

So I wrote, essentially, biographies of Osama bin Laden. And the thing about him was that he was—he was such a drudge. I mean, he was a puritanical—he had skills as an organizer. He had a vision of kind of multinational terrorism, that turned out to be effective, and he was ahead of his time on technology, satellites. So, you know, he definitely had some skills. But as a person, he was just intolerable on the page. He had nothing to say. His writings were incoherent. And he was uninteresting in life—joyless, really. And Saddam was very different. I mean, he was very funny in the recordings—terrifying and funny in the same conversation. He was also shrewd in a way that, say, Osama never was. He could sometimes see—because he understood power quite well, and survived both amidst a lot of internal hostility, also in a rough neighborhood, against great-power opposition. He survived a very long time by being very shrewd about power.

So sometimes when events would unfold around him, he would analyze and forecast. And you look back at this twenty years later, and you’re like, my god, he got this exactly right. And then in the next paragraph, he’s sputtering utter nonsense that—you know, of a conspiratorial and fantastical nature. So, anyway, he was a much more—I started working on this partly during the pandemic. And, like a lot of you, you know, catch up on your TV viewing during lockdown. And my wife and I—I watched for the second time—The Sopranos. And right into the first season I was like, oh, that’s Saddam. (Laughter.) I mean, that is so much his way of living within his family, within his clan, and how he kept people off balance.

ROSE: Bit of a disservice to Tony. (Laughter.) There are other characters in the—but, OK. So not everybody here may know that Saddam was a bestselling novelist. Tell us about his literary oeuvre.

COLL: Right. So it’s interesting because one of the—there are many mysteries as to why Saddam behaved the way he did in the runup to the invasion. So why did he not prepare defenses? Why did he—why did he prove to be unable to come clean about the true record of his own actions in destroying elements of his own program? Lots of different mysteries. But one of them was, why did he seem so passive as the Bush administration mustered for war? Yes, of course, he gave speeches, but he really didn’t prepare defenses. He didn’t really threaten, the way he had during the Kuwait War. You know, during the Kuwait War he deployed chemical weapons, tactical chemical weapons, and threatened to use them. It was only Jim Baker’s threat to nuke in reply that caused him, at the last minute, to stand down and not use the weapons. But he was serious about trying to deter the United States during that war.

This time he wasn’t. So why? Well, it turns out that he had become, in his sixties, enamored of the idea of writing novels. And he had sort of withdrawn from public life because he was, with good reason, afraid of assassination. And so he—but became—he wrote a first novel. And I talked to some of the aides who edited the novel. And he would send in these long, handwritten pages, and asked them to type them up, and then also clean up his Arabic. And they took him seriously and they did that. They sent the changes back. And then he would send them back to them with all of their edits ignored, except for the typing. (Laughter.) And then they realized that, like most writers, you know, they don’t want to be edited at all. (Laughter.) In Saddam’s case, the consequences of annoying him by overediting were, you know, plain to see. So they—anyway, he brought a novel out—

ROSE: Did he ever actually kill an editor or a copy editor?

COLL: No. No, he didn’t. But, I mean—

ROSE: I mean, we’ve all we wanted to kill copy editors.

COLL: But the sort of thing he would—in his—in his sense of himself as a patron of the arts, and a patron of writers, he gave out prizes to writers. He gave out prizes, cash prizes, to poets who wrote odes to himself. He gave out prizes to novelists who wrote authorized novels around themes of the Baath Party’s preference. And he had, you know, tiers of subsidies to novelists. And then he would bring them in, with the TV cameras, and he would converse with them. One time he was watching the news reader on the evening news. And he felt that the reader had made a grammatical mistake. And he called up the minister of culture and demanded that the next night he go back on, read the same news, and correct the mistake, and also that he be suspended for six months—which was light punishment by Saddam’s standard.

But the novel came out, Zabibah and the King is the first one. It’s the only one that’s remotely digestible. It’s also available in, you know, a reasonably credible English translation if you want to look at it. It’s terrible, but you’ll get a feel for—it’s didactic, and it’s a dialogue with lots of transparent kind of allegory. He wrote ultimately four novels. One was kind of autobiographical. And it was—it’s called Men and the City. And I use that as a chapter title because it provides an account of how he came of age in dire circumstances in Tikrit, and how he came up as a hard—as a hard boy. And it’s probably, by all accounts, you know, 95 percent accurate. And the psychological elements of it are super interesting. Other than that, there’s not a lot of source of interest in it.

But he had the novels. All were bestsellers. (Laughter.) And one was turned into a music—Zabibah was turned into a musical, as well as a—as well as a twelve-part television series with quite well-known Iraqi actress in the lead role. And all of this was happening in early 2000, 2001, 2003. In fact, during the invasion he was finishing the manuscript pages of his last novel. And he was still kind of sending them by underground messenger to the editors who worked with his state-run publishing house.

ROSE: You couldn’t make this stuff up.

COLL: So he was highly, highly distracted.

ROSE: And this isn’t even the strange stuff in the book. (Laughter.)

COLL: Yeah. Yeah. His family saga is quite striking. But I was just fortunate to be interested in this at a time twenty years, after when these materials were really accessible. In one case through litigation, but otherwise you could go around and collect a lot of things that made a lot more sense looking back twenty years on than they probably would have made in 2005 or 2007.

ROSE: OK. And let’s talk about something that still doesn’t make sense, and is the whole shebang, which is basically the reason why you did this project in the first place. You read the book. You have the archival evidence. You listened to his—the tapes of his inner discussions. And as with the Nixon-Kissinger tapes, you could actually hear what’s going on. You can see, oh, that’s what they were talking about. That’s what they were thinking. It’s almost as if you tape yourself and then you forget you have tapes, and you just act normally, like someone on some reality show. And that’s you actually see.

And many of the things we learn about Saddam are the picture that we thought. The guy was evil. He was a bastard. He tortured people. He was horrible. He was aggressive. He intended to get rid of the—you know, go back to predation the minute he had a chance to, in all sorts of various ways. And that kind of part of the picture is very familiar. And I can see people reading this book, nodding, and going, yeah, this is why we had to take him out. This is what—this confirms the Bush administration’s feelings about Saddam, in some way.

But the one thing, of course, that it doesn’t confirm, and the one thing that is the big puzzle, is he didn’t actually have the weapon. He actually committed national suicide on behalf of an image of weapons that he didn’t actually have. And the Bush administration, it turns out, we now know, to have sincerely believed—yes, they may have gilded the lily. Yes, they may have exaggerated the story. But they honestly believe that he was a growing immediate threat with various kinds of things, because that was what the circumstantial evidence showed. It wasn’t what the actual hard evidence showed, because we didn’t have it then, we got it later. And the hard evidence shows that, what did he do with his nuclear weapons programs throughout the ’90s? What happened in 1991?

COLL: Well, I mean, so he had three programs, biological, chemical, and nuclear. Chemical was in plain sight throughout the 1980s. During the war with Iran he made aggressive use of a very large arsenal, and he had the infrastructure to build it. The nuclear weapons program was unknown throughout the 1980s, when this brilliant, British-educated physicist was shepherding their way slowly towards the bomb. When it was discovered after the Iraq War in the summer of 1991, the world was quite alarmed by how close—how much progress they had made. And then the biological program was dangerous, but—and weaponized—but not deployed in the same way as chemical. So those were the things that international inspectors were interested in, in the summer of 1991 after he had been expelled from Kuwait and defeated roundly in the war—the First Gulf War, as we would call it.

And so the central mystery arises from his behavior in the summer of 1991.

ROSE: 1991.

COLL: So he has remnants of these—of the nuclear program, including these giant electromagnetic magnets that he was using for uranium separation. They’re very difficult to hide. He has a large arsenal of finished chemical shells of various kinds. And he has a very large infrastructure for biological weapons making, and some kind of sample-sized toxins. And the inspectors—now the U.N., in unison, with the Soviet Union and China and everyone else, has said: You must disarm under international inspection, otherwise you’re never going to get out of sanctions. That’s the dilemma he faces. He has survived in power, despite losing the war dramatically, but he faces all of these people coming in, under a U.N. mandate, to run around and look for his three weapons programs, as well as missiles, and to destroy them all. That’s what’s he facing. So what does he do?

He could cooperate with the inspections in order to persuade the U.N. Security Council, especially his allies, the Soviets, maybe the French, that there’s, you know, reason now to ease the sanctions because I’m cooperating. He could have tried to preserve everything and hide as much as he could, and give no quarter. Or he could do what he did, which was he basically turned to his trusted son-in-law and a few of his inner bodyguards, and he told them to go out into the desert in the middle of the night and destroy everything that could be found by the inspectors who were arriving, the Swedes in their white coats with their clipboards. Get this so they can’t find it, destroy it. And you have this—they went out into the desert with trucks. And you have this image of them just taking these shells and cracking them open and pouring it into the sand. And did they keep any records? Did they take any photographs of what they had done? No. They just did it because he told them to. Now, why did he want to, A, not get caught, but, B, not cooperate?

And I’ll finish here. I know we’re going over time. First, pride and power. He was an enormously dignified and hubristic leader, who was not going to humiliate himself in front of anybody. The idea of standing next to a bunch of Swedish inspectors and American spies embedded in the U.N. delegation while they knocked down all of the modernization that he had created over the previous twenty years was just unthinkable. He wasn’t going to do it.

Secondly, he didn’t want more pain by getting caught, but he also believed that cooperation was BS, was never going to get relief. There are all these wonderful passages on the tapes where his advisors, especially his diplomat, Tariq Aziz, says to him: Boss, look, you’re always right. (Laughter.) But, you know, if we go out into the world and try to cooperate and show the inspectors that we actually don’t have anything, the French, the Russians, they really want to get back to business with us. They’re going to start to loosen the sanctions. But we have to give them enough to work with in the Security Council. That means cooperation. And he says, look, you go do your thing. I’m willing to let you cooperate up to a point. But mark my words, they will never give us sanctions relief. This is a—this is a performance.

ROSE: Because they know, right? Because the CIA knows everything.

COLL: A, the CIA already knows what we don’t have, because they know everything. So this is just a game that they’re playing to put pressure on us. And, B, they don’t care about disarmament. They care about getting rid of me. And until they get rid of me, they’re never going to give us sanctions relief. And so all the rest, you’re just naïve. You’re playing the game that they’ve set up for you. And then in 1997, Madeleine Albright, secretary of state, gives a speech in which she says: No matter what Saddam Hussein does by way of cooperation or disarmament, we’re never going to give him sanctions relief until he’s gone. (Laughter.) And there’s basically, like, a meeting in which he says, you know, I told you so, I told you. So that’s the kind of tenor of it through the ’90s. He understood what he was doing, but he did it in a way that was completely beyond our ability to grasp and accept, because it didn’t—from outside, it didn’t make sense as a choice.

ROSE: You could say that, yes. Bat-shit crazy is the way I would put it. And, as somebody who was in the U.S. government with top secret clearances working on Iraq in the ’90s, if you had told us your story, you brought your book from the future and said, I can’t tell you where I got this but here’s what’s actually going on, we would have looked at you and said you are as nutty as Laurie Milroy or somebody else. You know, like, this is just an insane kind of story. It’s not actually—this couldn’t be true. The guy wouldn’t spend ten years doing the entire thing as if he had nuclear weapons, undergoing sanctions, letting himself be destroyed in a war, when he didn’t have them, and then thinking that we actually knew he didn’t have them.

Anyway, and this is what I find so scary, because we lived through these debates. And there was a lot of people in the United States who paid a lot of attention to Iraq policy. And it was the central national security challenge for multiple administrations. And everybody got it wrong, on all sides of the debate. There was not a single person in the entire world who described any time prior to well after the war the story that you now say is the actual truth of what happened. And what I find deeply, deeply scary about this, especially, again, having lived through it on the policymaking side, is that now I can’t look at other policy issues without thinking, what the hell don’t I know? I think I know this. I think the choice is between policy X and policy Y. I see the New York Times say, here the three options we’re debating among. And what if all three are just wrong, and there’s some weird reality? Do you come away with this deeply epistemically challenged about your understanding of the world today going forward?

COLL: Yeah. I mean, as a journalist, I think, if you’re—if you’re intellectually honest—I hate that phrase, but I used it—but if you’re trying to do a fair and honest job, you learn over time that all of your assumptions at the beginning of a reporting process are wrong. You just don’t know how they’re wrong until you get out there and start talking to people and looking at materials and thinking about what you find. And so once that happens to you, you know, enough, you’re conditioned to understand that you don’t know what you don’t know. And that in international affairs I try not to give advice or to go—you know, I’m just trying to figure out what happened most of the time, and trying to stitch things together as best I can. But I do think that the easiest conclusion to reach, from my perspective working not just on Iraq but on Afghanistan, is humility is a really great place to start sometimes.

Like, a little bit of humility about what you don’t know. And also, even where you have information, that your ability to stitch it together and connect it to decisions, you know, there’s a lot of people, probably on this call or in the audience, who have experience consuming raw intelligence or SIGINT. And, you know, I used to teach journalism about covering intelligence. And I would have some practitioners come in and explain why SIGINT, transcripts, can be so deceptive. And this recurs in Saddam. When, you know, Colin Powell staked his reputation on an Adlai Stevenson moment at the U.N., using intercepts that we can now understand why he got them so wrong. You know, if you’re sympathetic you can understand why he thought they were sinister. But the reality is that a lot of the information that is available requires interrogation, reinterrogation, and, you know,

if you’re acting in ways that can’t be reversed, some humility.

ROSE: We’re going to turn it over to questions. I just want to ask—I have to hear one more thing, because you mentioned the Swedes. And one of the cool little tidbits from a great reporter, as you see throughout this kind of thing, is the depiction of national political cultures that emerges in sort of odd little comparisons. And what do I mean by this? Saddam bribed lots of people. One of the reasons people in U.S. intelligence didn’t trust some of the things they were hearing from other intelligence services and from other countries who disagreed with U.S. policy was because we knew they were on Saddam’s payroll. Yes. Mr. French diplomat, yes. Mr. Russian diplomat, yes. Mr. Chinese diplomat, yes, Mr. U.N. diplomat, we know you’re getting cash from the regime. So don’t—you know, so we’re going to discount your criticism of our policies. I know because I was there, and that’s how we thought. Turns out they were right and we were wrong, but that’s a different story.

But what I want to say is—one of my favorite passages. Rolf Ekeus—

COLL: Yes, I knew you were going to say this.

ROSE: Was the leader of UNSCOM. And Tariq Aziz goes to him. And what does he say?

COLL: Sorry. So Tariq Aziz, who spoke Cubans round the clock and he was, like, always just emerging from a cloud in these meeting rooms in the foreign ministry, dimly lit by fluorescent lights. And in comes Rolf Ekeus. And they’re—it’s 1995. And they’re at a turning point on whether or not Iraq is doing enough to warrant sanctions relief. And he needs Ekeus to report something about the biological program that Ekeus is, like, I’m not sure I’m there yet. And Tariq Aziz takes a drag on his cigar. And he says, you know, we could put 500,000 euros in a Swiss account for you. And Ekeus goes, I’m sorry, that’s not what—that’s not the way we operate in Sweden. (Laughter.) And when I—when I was interviewing him, I think he’s still with us. He was amazing when I went over to spend a couple of days with him in Stockholm. But I said to him, that doesn’t seem like very much—(laughter)—for you. You were the head of UNSCOM. You had the whole world in his hands. And he was like, yeah, but even if it were more—(laughter)—

ROSE: I just love that because, you know, there are a lot of people who think the world is nice and everybody’s like, you know, Ekeus. And there are a lot of people think the world is awful, and everybody is like the people who took the bribes. And the answer is, no, sometimes people take bribes when they’re offered and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes where they come from tells you—helps you understand which ones will take the bribe and which ones won’t. (Laughter.) And the phrase, “that’s not how we do things in Sweden” is one of the takeaways from this book. And if I were Swedish, I would feel very, very proud of that. (Laughter.) As an American, there’s not much to feel proud about in this one.

But with that, let’s go to some questions from our members. Yes, over here, right in the front. Wait for your microphone. Please stand. Make a short, concise question. And after identifying yourself.

Q: I’m Alexandra Starr, the International Crisis Group. Congratulations.

COLL: Yes, nice to see you.

Q: So earlier this week the Council came out with a list of the best foreign policy decisions in American history and the worst. And the Iraq War topped the list of the worst. And I was wondering if you agreed with that assessment.

COLL: Let me answer that question, but let me do just a little bit of housekeeping, if you don’t mind. First of all, I would like to thank the jury and the Council for doing this. I didn’t say that when I came up, but I try to make a habit when something nice happens of saying thank you. And I would also like to recognize Mrs. Ross, or—is she here? Yeah. I was lucky enough to be here once for this a long time ago, and I met your husband. I think we sat together for an evening. I just wanted to remember him. He’s—

Q: Pardon me. He was telling me that, you know, he had gone to Iraq. And so they’d made him go through the desert. And it was really, really, really awful. And he came back. He didn’t believe that there were any—there was weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam just wanted to glorify himself. But he said nobody would listen to him.

COLL: Yeah. It was a hard case to make at the end there. But, to the question, I mean, I’m not—you know, I try to, as I say, stick to trying to figure out what happened. But there’s no question that the decision to invade Iraq was, you know, an unusually large error in American foreign policy decision making, because of the knock-on consequences as well as the high cost the country paid. The opportunity costs, but then the cost in lives, Iraqi lives, instability, you know, delivering opportunities for expansion to Iran. You know, sort of the strategic miscalculation, the hubris about the conduct of the war, the—you know, we’ve all read those books about the governing council and the young people—young idealistic Americans who came over to set up stock exchanges and things that just seem almost otherworldly at times, when you look back on them.

I think, for those of us who had lived through the precursors to 9/11 and 9/11 itself, the willingness to divert American resources away from the people who had attacked the United States and killed thousands of people in a surprise attack—the first surprise attack on American soil of that scale—of any—since Pearl Harbor. To turn in a direction and create a story about Iraq that was, you know, just wrong, and to then under-resource the efforts that were underway to try to prevent a follow-on attack or to suppress the people who had attacked us, that was also part of, to me, the error. So there’s so many ways you can critique it, but I do think it’s outsized.

And I also feel—I don’t know, every time I read—I’m reading a book, new book, by a woman named Laura Field, I think it is, called Furious Minds. And it’s kind of intellectual history of the MAGA movement, and where some of these Claremont and other influential self-described paleoconservatives kind of came from. And I was, struck listening to it today, that, you know, the Iraq War disillusionment—with the Iraq War and with the Afghan War and the way they were conducted after 9/11. There’s a direct line between those personal experiences and then the ideas that have shaped our populism today. So I think, you know, the full consequences of this need more time to digest. But I think we’re still living with some of those consequences, even though our involvement in Iraq is now not so central.

ROSE: I agree. Over here. Hold on a second.

Q: Hello. I’m Sewell Chan. Thank you so much, Gideon. Steve, congratulations.

I’m curious about the role of irrationality in kind of, you know, foreign policy, and whether or not kind of, you know, foreign policy thinkers give it enough attention. I say this at an age when there are a lot of erratic statements and perhaps decisions made by leaders, including our own. And I’m also curious about what you think the implications for foreign policymaking should be. Like, for example, has there been too much emphasis on signals intelligence and not enough on human intelligence? There are a lot of cutbacks right now in area studies, language training, and all the things that we said we would never forget or stop doing after, you know, X, Y, Z catastrophes in the past.

COLL: Yeah. So good to see you, Sewell. And thank you. Both of those are—so I’ll start with the second part. One of the things that was so striking about the dual history to me was the decision not to have any contact with the Saddam regime after 1991. There’s a transcript of a call between Clinton and Blair after Blair is elected, I think, in ’97. And Clinton says—they’re talking about Iraq. And Blair says—Clinton says, do you know—do any of your people talk to Saddam? Blair says, well, I don’t know. I just got here. But I can find out. And Clinton says, well, you know, because if I could, I would pick up the phone and talk to the son of a bitch, but I would be roasted politically if I did that. So I don’t.

And so this idea that isolating your enemy is somehow a punishment of the enemy, also that domestic politics can’t account for contact for the sake of contact—you know, if you don’t want to do it in public because you’re afraid your opposition in Congress is going to impeach you or something, then, you know, you have intelligence people who know how to do this backchannel thing. But the idea that we didn’t have contact for a long time meant we missed the opportunity to detect many of the things that are in the records. So that’s one aspect of it.

As to irrationality, I actually think that the problem is often the reverse, which is we attributed to Saddam, you know, a kind of cartoon craziness because his propaganda, and his narcissism, and the crudeness of his communication style—although he was quite a well-read autodidact, and kind of a subtle student of other great men, as he saw himself. But we saw him as a cartoon figure, sort of like, you know, Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler in The Great Dictator. And, in fact, the revelation of the records is not that he isn’t cruel and really, you know, evil, violent, quite—just violent in thought violent in deed, absolutely ruthless, you know, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. There’s just—you know, that’s the truth of him. That’s how history should remember him.

But as a man, as a man who made decisions, he was actually a lot more rational than we understood. That’s what I sort of feel like the answer to the question that I started out with is. OK, I get it. From his perspective, it makes a certain kind of sense. It’s very hard to get there, especially if you have no contact with him where you can’t see that he’s suddenly talking about his novels, or, you know, seemingly unavailable to his folks in the ways that he used to be. So what is that about?

So it does make me a little bit more forgiving, not of the content of the Trump administration’s sort of indiscriminate willingness to fly off and talk to the enemy for hours at a time. Obviously, there’s an amateurish aspect of that undermines the purpose of contact. But on the other hand, the idea that contact is somehow by itself a source of weakness, I just don’t buy. I think that it’s a—we, journalists, like, we talk to—maybe this is our journalistic bias. We talked to everybody. We talked to guys on death row. We talked to people at the top of governments. We talked to everybody because we know that face-to-face contact, and sidebar conversations, and inadvertent comments can be revelatory. Stitch them all together and you get a little bit closer to the—you know, to the vanishing truth.

ROSE: I hear what you’re saying. I would take a slightly different take on your first point about irrationality, which is—and it—(inaudible)—with yours, but it’s slightly different, which is we think of irrational as crazy. But it could be rational according to a worldview that is not ours. And so Saddam was not deeply lunatically erratic in the sense of sort of completely bonkers. But he had a distinct way of looking at the world that made sense to him, that he interpreted and acted within, but that was not shared with ours. And one of my favorite examples of this that you write about is the reaction to the Iran-Contra affair, in which the Iran-Contra—we all know what happened with the Iran-Contra affair. With the Israeli help, we brokered this deal, and money for arms, for hostages, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We in America had thought this was a giant idiocy, and we had giant sort of, you know, commissions and studies. Saddam looks at this and goes, aha, you see? And he tells his Cabinet—I love this. Well, what does he say?

COLL: Well, all right, so—

ROSE: He says, it’s the Jews. It’s the Jews. How many times do I have to tell you?

COLL: Yes, exactly.

ROSE: It’s the Jews.

COLL: Yes, he does say that. But the slight prelude that’s worth mentioning is that we came to him—the CIA came to him in 1982 because the Reagan White House feared that he was about to lose the war to Iran. The Iranians had counter attacked. And they looked like they were about to break through to Baghdad. So we go in there, a guy named Tom Twetten is still alive, bookseller in Vermont. Go buy his books. He flies into Baghdad with these line drawings based on satellite photography. And he tries to give the Iraqis information about how vulnerable they are. Long story short, his military says, this is really valuable. Saddam says, there’s got to be some wrinkle here. They’re not helping us straightforwardly. And they all say—the generals all say, yeah, boss, you’re always right. But we can go over the mountain and what’s on these drawings is actually there. And it’s helpful to us. So we want more of them, if you can keep them coming. And we’ll let you know if we look over the mountain and there’s nothing there.

And he says, fine, you do your thing. But I’m telling you, either there’s something doctored in this material, or they’re giving the same material to the Iranians. And so they all say, yeah, yeah. You know, you’re—then after the day Iran-Contra is announced, he basically—you can almost feel him bouncing into the meeting room. You know, I told you, I told you, I told you. And not only were they giving it to them all along, but they were collaborating with the Israelis. Haven’t I always told you there is a deep structure in this world and it can’t be altered by any of your diplomacy or your naivete. And what’s so meaningful about that is in the ’90s, when Tariq Aziz is urging him to cooperate, one of his go-to lines is, remember what we learned in 1986. There is a deep structure in the world and it can’t be altered. So, yeah.

ROSE: One last quick question, and then we’re going to go to drinks and cocktails. Over here. One second.

Q: Thank you very much. Albert Knapp, NYU, School of Medicine.

First of all, Gideon, thank you for another fantastic evening. Brilliant, incisive, and incredibly funny. Mr. Coll, congratulations on your award, and the other two. My question is, as physician, can you give us a little bit more detail as to how they actually got rid of anthrax, botulinum toxin, and also uranium cake, and the moderately well-differentiated uranium?

COLL: I can’t, really. I mean, the IAEA took the lead on the nuclear inspections. And they did have to manage the whole fuel cycle. And they did so, but they have the expertise and the tools to do it. I think in the case of the biological program, a lot of that—a lot of the finished materials had been destroyed by Saddam. They had all these dual use factories that they kept scrubbing. And it took the U.N. a while to realize which ones were which, and then they just basically destroyed them. That was their mandate, just to knock down all of the infrastructure wherever it was. But you’ll have to find a biology expert to answer that question.

ROSE: There are little details in the book about medical experimentation within the Saddam Hussein family, however. For example, the anecdote about his son in law who once got very upset with a subordinate and forced him to drink a gallon of gasoline, and then shot him in the stomach to see if he would explode.

COLL: Mmm hmm.

ROSE: That is a true story about the Saddam Hussein regime.

COLL: Yeah. And it recurs. I didn’t believe it when—I read it in some materials from the regime, and I didn’t believe it. But then I got access to the testimony of survivors from the ’91 uprising, that we sort of encouraged after the invasion of Kuwait, and where they were all suppressed after taking control of all but four provinces in Iraq—largely a Shia uprising. And there were some human rights investigators who did some big surveys and interviews after the U.S. invasion. One of the few good things to come from it was to give those—that history a voice. And you go back and you look at the raw testimony of the survivors, and the Iraqis did that trick on people all the time when they detained them, yeah.

ROSE: Did they ever explode?

COLL: No, it’s not—it’s a biological myth. Yeah.

ROSE: On that note, thank you, Steve Coll. And welcome to the cocktail hour. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.