I’m going to go ahead here and steal a fantastic quote I read from Matt’s 4-star review of The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., and The OrigI’m going to go ahead here and steal a fantastic quote I read from Matt’s 4-star review of The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., and The Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq (posted 08/09/2024) by former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser, when describing U.S. actions in the Middle East, from his point of view, and what Saddam and many other foreign leaders have undoubtedly thought:
”The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves, which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.”
After reading Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Steve Coll’s book on just how disastrously misunderstood the situation truly was when we invaded Iraq in March of 2003, by both sides, it’s a perfect synopsis for the downright ridiculous war.
Let’s not pretend like we were all screaming against it, either. Obviously, the more it dragged on and on, the dumber we began to feel as a nation. But only a very limited numbers of Congress voted against it, and the majority of Americans were calling for his head. Even though I was young when this happened, I wasn’t so young as to not remember the moment when the bombs dropped on television, with the news channel literally playing Outkast’s hit 2002 song, “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad.”
It’s an excellently executed narrative, using the words and views many Iraqis involved in Saddam’s government had at that time in history, such as his leading nuclear scientist, his top political advisers, some of his close family (all of whom were drunk with power - if not just plain drunk - and batshit crazy). It’s nice to get the Middle Eastern version instead of it being purely Westernized, as is so often the case.
The whole story is told in three sections: the first of when Saddam came to power in 1979 and how the U.S. government covertly backed the Iraqi regime in their war with Iran, the second part in which the U.S. decided after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait (1990) that we’d no longer tolerate his regime - particularly their use of chemical weapons attacks against civilians - thus, beginning our initial attempts to topple him from power.
The final part is where things get so outrageous due to misinformed intelligence reports and false beliefs from both countries as to the other’s intentions. It covers 9/11 and the years following the attack, where we attempted to track Saddam down.
Really, as crazy as Saddam was, most Iraqis had accepted it and learned how to live according to his rules. We gave them a ton of empty promises just like we did in Afghanistan - about building democracy, building infrastructure and modernizing Iraq - only to destroy it entirely and then leave them to deal with the devastation our assumptions caused.
As we’re well-aware now, Iraq possessed no WMD. The craziest part of all of this was that because Iraq, much like most countries in the Middle East (and elsewhere) tended to believe in the all-knowing power of the Americans and the CIA in particular, Saddam and his government were convinced that we were aware they’d destroyed all the work they’d achieved toward chemical and nuclear weapons capabilities about a decade prior to invasion.
Saddam was getting tired of constant inspections by UN ambassadors, but instead of publicly getting rid of the weapons they’d begun building and the research they possessed, they went about destroying it in secret. So there was no actual proof in the beginning that everything had been destroyed, only the words of Saddam (which weren’t exactly the most trustworthy).
Hussein genuinely held the belief that the CIA was playing its usual games with him; making up the WMD issue as a propaganda ploy, in an effort to gain the support of other countries in our attempt to topple him from power. While it’s true that this was a goal aligned with the WMD goal, it wouldn’t have been a good enough excuse for an invasion.
There’s not much more I can really say other than I definitely believe this is a book worth reading. No matter who tells it, the story is going to be convoluted and chaotic, so it’s hardly Coll’s fault if things don’t appear to be written straightforward: there really isn’t a better way of telling such a confusing story, so kudos must be given to Coll for his extraordinary undertaking and ability to tell it as clearly as possible.
It looks like I’m moving away from my former decision not to rate memoirs, lol. In all seriousness, though, I think what I’ve decided is that I’m openIt looks like I’m moving away from my former decision not to rate memoirs, lol. In all seriousness, though, I think what I’ve decided is that I’m open to rating some memoirs- but only after careful consideration. I do not take other people’s traumas lightly, and I believe that’s what’s made me feel averse to rating many in the past. But when a book doesn’t involve trauma, or when I’m rating it less than five stars for deliberate reasoning other than minimizing that trauma or experience, then I feel it’s fair game.
Because The Gray Bird of Baghdad was essentially a feel-good story about a recently retired Secret Service agent, given one final assignment to locate an Iraqi biochemical engineer, an agent who didn’t come to any harm in pursuit of this goal, I don’t feel like a terrible person for just giving it an average three-star rating.
Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s remarkable what Steve Monteiro and his barebones team accomplished, and it’s nice to know that there are career D.C. defense workers who care about particular individuals - rather than simply serving as cogs in a machine. Monteiro begins his story telling us how he worked rescue operations at Ground Zero, and how, like so many other Americans after 9/11, wanted to make those responsible pay for the hurt and suffering they’d inflicted on our country.
Yet with the mission of rescuing this Iraqi scientist (basically forced into doing this job under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime) Monteiro, after some time, stops seeing Iraqis as the enemy, especially the scientist-turned-friend in question, Thamer Imran.
Instead, he sees how Thamer and his family were simply living their normal lives (normal for them, that is) until the Americans showed up and turned not just his, but many other innocent civilians’, world(s) upside down in an utterly immoral and pointless war. Basically, he sees how closely Thamer’s own life - his career, his marriage, and kids - parallel that of his own, thousands of miles away.
As other reviewers have pointed out, it’s still a good read, and I’m happy Monteiro was able to tell not just his story, but that of an everyday Iraqi whose life was inalterably changed by our military’s actions.
Some of the scenes even managed to be funny, with Monteiro bringing Thamer, a very conservative man, to Miami’s South Beach for interviews : “Upon taking in his expression and his utter embarrassment after being caught looking at the topless women casually rollerblading by, I wondered if perhaps I’d made a mistake in choosing Miami Beach for our meetings - given its party atmosphere and rather lax laws concerning nudity.” - not verbatim, btw, but it does get the message across.
It appeared on my recommended books to read on GR, and as I’ve pretty much alluded to, it seems to be self-published; a story the author just wanted to get out there more for the sake of telling it, rather some unfulfilled journalistic dream he’d always longed to fulfill, to demonstrate his writing prowess.
It’s very to the point and unfortunately is a bit tedious (as reviewers have mentioned) when describing bureaucratic obstacles and the frustration involved in overcoming these obstacles. It could have been summed up in a lot less detail, but it’s a still a quick, lighthearted read that if you’re interested in, I don’t think you’ll regret reading.
All my gratitude and appreciation for Steve, his crew, and all American servicemen and women. Thank you for keeping our country safe; veterans are amazing and deserve all of the support in the world.
Really not much to say about this book except: if you haven’t read it already: READ IT! It’s a quick read, and it’s such an engrossing page turner, yoReally not much to say about this book except: if you haven’t read it already: READ IT! It’s a quick read, and it’s such an engrossing page turner, you could easily finish it in a single sitting (given all the school work and reading I have to complete, along with the fact that I generally read 3 books at a time, it takes me closer to 5-7 days to read all 3 books).
For those of you living under a rock (lol, sorry) and haven’t heard of the Jordanian triple agent who was meant to deliver the best intel (and really, the only significant intel) the CIA had received on al-Qaeda since bin Laden’s 2003 escape in Tora Bora, this book will tell you everything you need to know about the elusive doctor, as well as his radical jihadist beliefs hidden under a seemingly moderate religious stance as well as a relatively moderate to nice lifestyle. He was known by his neighbors and those in his city as a compassionate doctor who worked mainly with injured women and children refugees fleeing Palestine.
He had a dark alter ego though, “Abu Dujana al-Khorasani”, who came out to play on Internet chat rooms as well as the world’s leading jihadist sites when the young doctor (real name: Humam al-Balawi) finished his work day and retired in the apartment upstairs his father that he shared with his wife, Defne, and only child, a toddler daughter named Leila.
It did not take long before the CIA and its Jordanian equivalent, the Mukhabarat, took notice of “Abu Dujana’s” soaring Internet popularity among terrorist cells, alongside his disturbing blog postings speaking of wanting to experience jihad, wanting to fight the American terrorists in a holy war, and going so far as to post real videos of Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq being blown up or worse, the terrorist network’s awful filmed beheadings to cause as much pain as possible to the west. After the agencies collaborated and figured out who the man was, it didn’t take long before he was arrested and detained in the Mukhabarat fortress of cells. He apparently broke down after only three days of interrogation, and agreed to do whatever the spy agency requested of him.
To me, this is where the story gets really suspicious. It’s understandable that a mild-mannered young doctor who only posed as a radical jihadist online (and didn’t have any real experience in warfare) would break pretty quickly under harsh interrogation methods. But the fact that he offered to go to Pakistan, where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda troops had their strongholds, should have definitely set off red flags. These guys were notorious for being paranoid, as they should have been, and immediately shot newcomers if the slightest suspicion arose. So the fact that he was not only willing to go, but immediately accepted within the terrorist group again, raises a ton of red flags. And within a month, he’s sitting in a room recording the second and third most wanted targets by the CIA, then sending the recording to them?
I can understand that the intelligence agency was desperate to finally have a good agent with real ties to the terrorist organization that they had been hunting for so long which constantly managed to elude them. But it isn’t just the reader who will express doubts as to al-Balawi’s intentions/loyalty, as you will see when you read about the operation to meet him at the American CIA main base in Khost, Afghanistan, with WAY too many soldiers involved in what should have been a much smaller operation. Counterterrorism experts who had decades of training in reading body language, determine loyalties, deciding how to set these meetings up... got no say, and instead the entire operation was handed over to a young female officer, Jenifer Matthews. While Matthews was brilliant and her assessments of Al-Qaeda had contributed to tracking down and taking out key members of the terrorist groups from the United States, this had been her first - and sadly, only - overseas operation that would be conducted out of a war zone (which she had never been in, either).
Instead of letting veterans who had served multiple tours throughout the region head the operation/meeting with al-Balawi (and who knew how operations and informants worked) for some reason, the senior CIA officials were more willing to let the extremely inexperienced Matthews call the final shots despite many bad feelings and disagreements from the servicemen and security guards who knew better. This ultimately resulted in al-Balawi arriving at the meeting in a “special” suicide vest, much stronger and more destructive than most (given its objective to take out Ali bin Zeid, a Jordanian Mukhabarat officer with direct ties to King Abdullah II of Jordan - they were first cousins - who many terrorist loathed for their pro-Western sentiment toward Israel and toward the Americans in general. Also, their chance to finally take revenge on the CIA for all of the drone killings in the past decade or so was not lost on them).
So yeah, it ends with him pulling up, fumbling for the detonator switch, no one reacting fast enough (or likely not wanting to prematurely) and instantly killing or fatally wounding 7 CIA officers, along with the Afghan taxi driver (friendly with the Americans), bin Zeid, and several security officers. A sad but cautionary tale that no matter how important intelligence may be, unless it may save lives at THAT moment, informants need to be more properly vetted, more qualified agents need to lead the operation, and something this awful could have been so much more easily avoided.
Again, even for people who are not normally into reading books about real historical events or specifically, books about Islamic terrorist organizations, this book still won the Pulitzer Prize for a reason. It reads as though it is some sort of spy thriller, leaves your heart racing through each turn of the page, much as if the entire incident were really just a sensational Hollywood film. Five stars, easy.
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