Twenty years before Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld helped lead the George W. Bush administration’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, he traveled to Baghdad to meet with the country’s autocratic leader, Saddam Hussein. It was 1983, and the CIA had recently begun covertly sharing battlefield intelligence with Iraq about Iranian troops, helping Saddam stave off defeat in the bloody war he had foolishly launched against Tehran in 1980. This assistance against a mutual enemy had started to thaw American relations with Iraq, which had been strained in the 1970s by the Arab wars with Israel, the OPEC oil embargo, and Baghdad’s engagement with Moscow. Hoping to build on the new ties, President Reagan had dispatched Rumsfeld—then a business executive with a prominent Republican Party background who had served in Congress and as a senior official in the Nixon and Ford administrations—as a special envoy. He brought with him a friendly letter to Saddam signed by Reagan and a gift of golden horse spurs.
In the years that followed, writes the journalist Steve Coll in The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, the Reagan administration embarked on “a dark and cynical chapter in American policymaking.” The United States turned a blind eye to and at times actively helped obfuscate Iraq’s use of poison gas—an internationally banned weapon of mass destruction—against both Iranian soldiers and Kurdish villages; in Coll’s assessment, from 1984 to 1988 the US “not only accepted but also effectively collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons” even as “Washington continued to insist, in public, that it condemned chemical-weapon use by any and all.” At the same time, the Reagan administration was secretly and illegally supplying weapons to Iran as part of what became known as the Iran-contra affair. When exposed in 1986, this double-dealing fueled Saddam’s paranoia about the US and became a crucial factor in what Coll describes as the Iraqi dictator’s “fevered, confusing experience of the CIA as an ally, enemy, and manipulative force in the Middle East.”
A downward spiral followed, from Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to the Gulf War and its ambiguous, festering aftermath of a no-fly zone and disputes over United Nations weapons inspectors, before culminating in a final confrontation the Bush administration engineered over what turned out to be false accusations that Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. As the 2003 invasion of Iraq neared, grainy archival footage resurfaced of the younger versions of the two future adversaries shaking hands—Rumsfeld with his slicked-back hair, square-shouldered power suit, and 1980s CEO glasses, Saddam with his prominent mustache and ostentatious green military fatigues. The footage emanated a sense of complicated historical significance, even if what it all added up to was not precisely clear.