The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003
By Steve Coll
Allen Lane £35
Saddam Hussein was indisputably an obscenely bloody tyrant. But after one has waded through this forensic analysis of the follies and missteps leading up to the Second Gulf War, it is hard not to feel a tiny bat squeak of sympathy for him.
By the late-1980s, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war (which he, of course, had initiated), the United States was steadily
