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Articles by Steve Coll
The Bin Ladens
Thursday 24 April 2008 | 1 hour 12 minutes 49 seconds Steve Coll's new book 'The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and its Fortune' charts the rise of a family, and the story of the Saudi royal family they loyally served. Steve Coll is most recently the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Ghost Wars. He also won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism.
Biblio File: Blind man’s bluff in Iraq
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003by Steve Coll Penguin Random House, 2024, 556 pp, $65.00 Steve Coll, former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and a long-time staff writer for the New Yorker, is the author of a string of books, dating back to the late 1980s, on corporate America (The Deal of the Century, The Taking of Getty Oil) and on secret intelligence (Ghost Wars, Directorate S).
NON-FICTION: HUBRIS AND MISCALCULATION
The Achilles Trap By Steve Coll Penguin ISBN: 978-0525562269 576pp. The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. In The Achilles Trap, Steve Coll, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of nine books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the decisions that led to the war.
Lawfare Daily: Steve Coll on Saddam Hussein and the Limits of American Power in the Middle East
Published by The Lawfare Institute in Cooperation With Steve Coll’s latest book, “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq,” seeks to explain why Saddam Hussein would put his regime at risk over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that didn’t exist. Saddam ultimately lost his regime, and his life, in part because he saw America as an omniscient puppeteer seeking to dominate the Middle East.
Why didn’t you tell me?
Long before Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, many Iraqis suspected that foreign intelligence services were manipulating their country’s domestic affairs. Since the 1920s – when Gertrude Bell manoeuvred behind the scenes in the early days of the Iraqi state under the British mandate – otherwise inexplicable events were often attributed to the workings of ‘Abu Naji’, a quasi-mythical figure used as shorthand to refer to the meddling British, and later the Americans.
The Orwell Foundation
The Achilles Trap Published by: Allen Lane is a rigorous, expertly controlled account of what Steve Coll calls the “march to disaster”: the US’s decades-long dealings with Saddam Hussein, characterized by fateful miscalculations and misunderstandings on both sides – a “cascade of errors”, as Coll puts it – and culminating in the catastrophically misjudged American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq
All books featured in this new section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2024, pp. xx-xx Middle East Books Review By Steve Coll, Penguin Press, 2024, hardcover, 576 pp.
Pompous or nefarious? Middle East Conflict on Oil Markets? Iraq-Iran war parallels Israeli-Iran conflict?
Who is Germán & Co? From Puerto Octay, overlooking Llanquihue Lake in southern Chile, the setting for Gaspar Antillo's film Nobody Knows I'm Here, I try to examine the mind of my friend and colleague, Germán Toro Ghio.
Opinião | Por que ditadores como Saddam Hussein deixam perplexos os presidentes americanos
THE NEW YORK TIMES - Os Estados Unidos cometeram seu pior erro de política externa da era do pós-Guerra Fria quando invadiram o Iraque em 2003 para desarmar Saddam Hussein de suas supostas armas de destruição em massa. A guerra que se seguiu cobrou um preço altíssimo em recursos e vidas iraquianas e americanas, além de ter fortalecido o Irã, energizando conflitos regionais indiretos que enredaram Washington no Oriente Médio, como o governo Biden redescobriu, dolorosamente.
Steve Coll on Saddam Hussein.
Episode 12 of the ‘Night Owls’ podcast features an interview with Steve Coll, author of ‘The Achilles Trap. Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the origins of America’s invasion of Iraq.” My podcast partner Joe Klein conducted the interview. It is well worth your time. Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Mr. Coll is the author of nine books. Four of them, each in their own way, concern the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003
On the evening of 13 December 2003, nine months after the invasion of Iraq, a combat team from the US 4th Infantry Division arrived at a small farmhouse by the River Tigris, north of Baghdad. Soldiers pulled back a mat on a patio to reveal a narrow, chest-deep hole, out of which they dragged a dishevelled Saddam Hussein, a pistol tucked in his belt. ‘I am the president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate,’ he said.
Why Authoritarians Like Saddam Hussein Confound U.S. Presidents
America committed its worst foreign policy mistake of the post-Cold War era when it invaded Iraq in 2003 to disarm Saddam Hussein of his supposed weapons of mass destruction. The war that followed exacted an appalling price in Iraqi and American lives and resources, and it also empowered Iran, energizing regional proxy conflicts that have entrapped Washington in the Middle East, as the Biden administration has rediscovered painfully.
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq:
Stand Up is a daily podcast. I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day. Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 700 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous souls Hey Friends! Here is a special Author Interview I did with Steve Coll whose new book is out today! Steve Coll is one of the most important and respected journalists of our time and he is out with a new book.
When We Misread Dictators... Steve Coll on Saddam Hussein and the American Invasion of Iraq
Steve Coll is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has served as President and CEO of New America and the Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent book is The Achilles’ Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. Access Episodes Ad-Free on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. Proudly sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
The CIA and the Invasion of Iraq
BOOK REVIEW: The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, The CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq By Steve Coll / Penguin Press Reviewed by Charles Duelfer The Reviewer – Charles Duelfer was a political military officer at the State Department in the 1980’s, Deputy Chairman of the UNSCOM Iraq Weapons Inspectorate in the 1990’s and was head of the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group in 2004.
How Iraq Happened
In This Review In This Review Sometimes foreign policy lies downstream from technology. When navies ran on wind, the lumber that could produce sailing ships was a prized natural resource. The arrival of steam power turned mines and coaling stations into crucial strategic assets. Then the switch from steam to oil made petroleum deposits treasures beyond measure. The oil riches of the Middle East were first discovered in 1908, and soon the region was essential to the global economy.
'The Achilles Trap': Studying the paradox of the Second Gulf War Original
Examining the decades-long history of misunderstandings and missteps on both sides that led to a war that killed some 200,000 Iraqi civilians and thousands of Americans. Toward the end of 2002, with the United Nations scheduled to vote on a resolution authorizing a US-led attack on Iraq, president George W. Bush asked the CIA to assemble evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties to terrorism and possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
A Ruinous War and Peacemaking in Gaza
On both sides, the celebrations were tempered by an awareness of those still in captivity. Hamas freed children and their mothers but not their fathers, and elderly women but not their husbands. The two hundred and forty prisoners whom Israel released were, according to the Jerusalem-based human-rights group B’ Tselem, a fraction of the nearly five thousand Palestinians held on security grounds as of September—a figure that rose sharply after October 7th.
Hostage-Taking and the Use of Children and the Vulnerable in War
The war in Gaza has the feel of history sliding backward. On October 7, 1985, in Alexandria, Egypt, four armed members of a faction of the Palestine Liberation Front boarded the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship that was touring the Mediterranean. The hijackers seized the ship’s captain, herded passengers into a dining room, and declared that unless Israel released fifty Palestinian prisoners by three o’clock that afternoon they would start executing hostages.
Hostage-Taking and the Use of Children and the Vulnerable in War Original
Klinghoffer’s murder became an infamous touchstone in the nineteen-eighties era of made-for-TV hijackings, a time when armed liberation movements in the Middle East demonstrated the asymmetric power of spectacular mass hostage-taking. Terrorists of that era wanted “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead,” as the RAND Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins put it in 1974, because they sought to call attention to their cause without alienating sympathizers.
How Would a Humanitarian Pause Work in Gaza?
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How Would a Humanitarian Pause Work in Gaza? Original
On Friday, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected calls for even a temporary ceasefire until Hamas and its allies return the more than two hundred and thirty hostages, many of them civilians, whom the militants seized in the October 7th attacks.
THE ACHILLES TRAP
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author returns with a tour de force examination of the events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As Coll, author of Ghost Wars and Directorate S, points out, Saddam Hussein left thousands of hours of tapes, many of which the author’s lawyers extracted from the Pentagon.
The Plight of the Hostages and the Rapidly Escalating Crisis in Gaza Original
That pleading captured the pain and the moral complexity that often permeates hostage crises. Israel, tragically, has had experience with many such cases in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as with international hostage crises arising out of hijackings and other terrorist attacks, such as the seizure and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, in Munich. At times, Israel has negotiated lopsided prisoner exchanges to free its captives.
Biden’s Israel Policy Gets Put to the Test Original
Last week, arriving for a one-day visit to Tel Aviv, President Biden descended from Air Force One and bear-hugged Netanyahu before a phalanx of cameras. “You are not alone,” he said later, in a speech to Israelis about the Hamas-led terror attacks of October 7th, when militants broke out of Gaza and murdered more than fourteen hundred Israelis and seized hostages.
The New Yorker News & Politics Newsletter
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Source photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty If you want to grasp just how cynical and performative Republican Party politics are these days, consider the reactions to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to elevate the U.S. Attorney David Weiss, whose office has been investigating Hunter Biden for years, to the status of special counsel.
By John Cassidy Verified, David D. Kirkpatrick Verified, Steve Coll Verified, Benjamin Wallace-Wells Verified
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The New Yorker
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An Ambassador Without a Country Original
Zalmai Rassoul, a nephew of Amanullah’s who is now eighty years old, today lives alone in an apartment on the Embassy’s upper floors. In 2020, President Ashraf Ghani appointed Rassoul as the Ambassador to the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Who Are the Taliban Now? | Steve Coll
Hassan Abbas’s book surveys the second Islamic Emirate’s ideology and leading personalities and probes its internal tensions. Nearly two years after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, the UN refers to the regime only as “the de facto authorities,” to avoid any hint of formal recognition of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban call their government. By any name, the Taliban today control Afghanistan’s territory, as well as federal ministries and local administrations.
The Republicans Begin to Eye 2024
Come next August, another season of Republican Presidential-primary debates is set to begin, and candidate Trump is again a seismic force of instability in the G.O.P. Last week, the Republican National Committee chair said that, during the 2024 cycle, all participants in its televised primary debates should first sign a “loyalty pledge” promising to support whichever candidate is finally selected to take on the Democratic nominee—presumably Joe Biden.
What Should the Title of the 2023 Sequel to the 2013 book, "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power"
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power By Steve Coll https://www.amazon.com/Private-Empire-ExxonMobil-American-Power/dp/0143123548 In this, the first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil—the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States—Steve Coll reveals the true extent of its power.
A Veteran Press Critic Wants Her Profession to Defend Democracy
Book Review|A Veteran Press Critic Wants Her Profession to Defend Democracy https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/books/review/newsroom-confidential-margaret-sullivan.html Nonfiction In her new memoir, “Newsroom Confidential,” Margaret Sullivan argues that traditional ideas about reportorial objectivity need to be re-examined in an era of constant assaults on truth. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
Some Hope for Afghans in Need
The Biden Administration’s announcement this week that it will release $3.5 billion in frozen Afghan-central-bank funds to a new Swiss foundation—the Afghan Fund, whose mission will be “to benefit the people of Afghanistan”—is such an experiment. The foundation’s bespoke rules will increase Afghan participation in deliberations over the money’s fate and broaden international responsibility, yet allow the Biden Administration to wield a veto over any disbursements.
A Year After the Fall of Kabul
Public anniversaries mark the meaning of the past in the political present. In Washington, one year after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the failure of the United States and its allies is emotive and polarizing. This month, House Republicans issued a report, entitled “A ‘Strategic Failure,’ ” which is unsparing of the Biden Administration’s decision last year to withdraw all remaining American forces from Afghanistan, and of its conduct of the chaotic evacuation that followed.
A Year After the Fall of Kabul
The stark politicization of America’s experience in Afghanistan threatens to add one more loop of failure and self-defeat to a sad record. Accountability is vital if it can be achieved impartially and reflectively, yet the urgent question of the moment does not involve the apportionment of blame. Many of the forty million Afghans left behind last summer by evacuating troops and diplomats are being battered by severe crises of hunger and persecution.
Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Taliban Original
The U.S. drone strike in Kabul last Saturday that killed Zawahiri, who was seventy-one, added a punctuation mark to the long search for justice for the victims of 9/11 and of other deadly attacks that Zawahiri directly approved, such as the bombing of two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998, which killed twelve Americans and more than two hundred Africans.
Colorado Primary Election 2022: Live Results, Map, and Analysis
The 2022 midterm elections will be a referendum on the current President, Joe Biden, and his predecessor, Donald J. Trump—as well as a profound test of American democracy. The midterm primaries began on March 1st, in Texas, and will continue through the fall, allowing voters in each state to narrow the field in races for the House, Senate, and governors’ mansions. The campaigns will culminate in the general election, on November 8th.
Virginia Primary Election 2022: Live Results, Map, and Analysis
The 2022 midterm elections will be a referendum on the current President, Joe Biden, and his predecessor, Donald J. Trump—as well as a profound test of American democracy. The midterm primaries began on March 1st, in Texas, and will continue through the fall, allowing voters in each state to narrow the field in races for the House, Senate, and governors’ mansions. The campaigns will culminate in the general election, on November 8th.
Nevada Primary Election 2022: Live Results, Map, and Analysis
The 2022 midterm elections will be a referendum on the current President, Joe Biden, and his predecessor, Donald J. Trump—as well as a profound test of American democracy. The midterm primaries began on March 1st, in Texas, and will continue through the fall, allowing voters in each state to narrow the field in races for the House, Senate, and governors’ mansions. The campaigns will culminate in the general election, on November 8th.
Iowa Primary Election 2022: Live Results, Map, and Analysis Original
The 2022 midterm elections will be a referendum on the current President, Joe Biden, and his predecessor, Donald J. Trump—as well as a profound test of American democracy. The midterm primaries began on March 1st, in Texas, and will continue through the fall, allowing voters in each state to narrow the field in races for the House, Senate, and governors’ mansions. The campaigns will culminate in the general election, on November 8th.
How Will Trump’s Primary Messages Affect the Midterms?
Since late April, citizens nostalgic for Donald Trump’s Twitter feed have been able to sate themselves on Truth Social, a platform launched in February by one of Trump’s companies. After an initial period of silence, the former President now “truths” and “retruths” multiple times a day for his three million-plus followers.
The Complexities of the Ukraine Dilemma Original
In September, 1949, two Ukrainian agents working with the C.I.A. landed near Lviv, in what was then the Soviet Union. They were the vanguard of an operation that would acquire the code name Redsox. Its aim was to connect with anti-Soviet insurgents fighting by the tens of thousands in Ukraine, as well as in smaller numbers elsewhere on Russia’s rim. Soviet moles betrayed the program, however, and at least three-quarters of the Redsox agents disappeared.
Secret History of U.S. Diplomatic Failure in Afghanistan
Steve Coll & Adam Entous The New Yorker December 13, 2021 A trove of unreleased documents reveals a dispiriting record of misjudgment, hubris, and delusion that led to the fall of the Western-backed government. Read Full Article »
The Secret History of the U.S. Diplomatic Failure in Afghanistan
A week later, General Austin S. Miller, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, flew into Doha, and Khalilzad met him for breakfast. They were joined by Nader Nadery and Abdul Matin Bek, two young advisers to Ghani, who had spoken with Taliban envoys. Nadery and Bek reported that several Taliban had boasted contemptuously about defeating America. “They’re running with their tails between their legs,” one of the Taliban negotiators had exclaimed.
The Fall of the bin Ladens
Bin Laden has roots in Jeddah, the Red Sea port city where, in 1931, his father, Mohammed bin Laden, a poor migrant from Yemen, founded and built a construction company that grew eventually into the largest in the kingdom, as part of the family’s flagship conglomerate, the Saudi Binladin Group. It built palaces, renovated mosques in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and expanded across the Arab world.
A Literary Guide to Understanding Afghanistan, Past and Present
On August 15th, the Taliban took control of Kabul and assumed the authority they’d claimed to hold from their exiled posts. Afghanistan had been free, almost completely, of their brutal regime for 20 years. We spent a week watching hordes of people rush to the Kabul airport in the hopes of escaping a bleak future, one that would have been a return to the past. The past is now the future, time and politics being circuitous creatures.
The Lessons of Defeat in Afghanistan
Early in 2001, scurvy broke out in western Afghanistan. Typhoid and, possibly, cholera spread, along with malnutrition, a crisis exacerbated by three years of drought and five years of Taliban misrule. That May, Ruud Lubbers, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, visited the country and warned of a “humanitarian disaster.” Then Osama bin Laden unleashed the September 11th attacks, and, during the counterstrike, American warplanes dropped almost eighteen thousand bombs.
The Spyware Threat to Journalists
Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative reporter from Azerbaijan, is an icon among the subtribe of journalists who work to expose cross-border financial corruption. She has broken big stories about money laundering and dodgy banking, despite being targeted by President Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarian regime. Operatives planted cameras in her home in Baku and, in 2012, released a video of her having sex with her boyfriend.
The People We’re Leaving Behind in Afghanistan
On September 3, 2019, Abdul Samad Amiri, the acting head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission’s office in his home province of Ghor, posted a reflective message on Facebook. He was just shy of thirty. He had grown up amid “the trauma of more than 40 years’ civil war and feel wholeheartedly the affliction imposed on my people,” he wrote. Yet he was optimistic. “I can’t ignore or forget the dreams for Afghanistan’s future and her place as a part of this world. . . .
In Gaza, an Impasse Cannot Be Mistaken for Stability
In early May, Palestinians protesting the pending eviction of six families from their homes in East Jerusalem clashed with Israeli police. For many Palestinians, the eviction cases evoked a long history of dispossession while presenting evidence of continued efforts to remove them from the city.
The Politics Behind India’s COVID Crisis
Illustration by João Fazenda The coronavirus thrives off of complacent politicians. At the time of that rally, new infections in India, by official counts, had exploded to two hundred and fifty thousand a day, a figure that last week reached four hundred thousand. Shortages of oxygen and hospital beds have driven desperate citizens—and even hospital directors—to beg for help on social media.
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