'Assassin's Gate' examines reasons behind U.S. invasion of Iraq

'Assassin's Gate' examines reasons behind U.S. invasion of Iraq
(HAS TRIM)
By Charles Matthews
Knight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT)
"The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq" by George Packer Farrar; Straus and Giroux ($25)
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Why are we in Iraq?
It's a question that seems to get asked more often -- and to grow more unanswerable -- as the war wears on. And it's one that George Packer acknowledges early -- in the middle of the second chapter -- in his fine new book: "Why did the United States invade Iraq? It still isn't possible to be sure -- and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War." Yet nothing about Packer's book feels premature. His examination of the ideologies, the personalities, the politics and the events that propelled us into the conflict only heightens the urgency of finding answers to the question.
It's a book written out of disillusionment: Packer initially supported the war because of his hatred of Saddam's tyranny and his hope that a democratic state could be created in Iraq. "To give my position a label," he writes, "I belonged to the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently prowar liberals, who supported a war by about the same margin that the voting public had supported Al Gore."
As in his previous book "Blood of the Liberals," a sensitive, personal account of how American liberalism turned elitist and drifted out of the mainstream, Packer strives to be measured and fair -- acknowledging his biases, but striving to keep an open mind. Yet he is angered and saddened not only by the speciousness of the arguments that propelled us into the war but also by the course it took -- especially by the lack of planning for what would happen after the invasion.
"The top civilians in the administration, and the top brass at the Pentagon, and the top officials in Iraq all held onto their positions and failed the men and women they had sent to carry out their policy," he writes. As a result, "the Iraq War, like every war -- just or unjust, won or lost -- became a conspiracy of the old and powerful against the young and dutiful."
He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the conflict, in the ideas of neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz -- "the intellectual architect of the war," Packer calls him -- and Richard Perle, who would help reshape American foreign policy with an aggressive approach that recognized the United States' status as the sole superpower and proclaimed its mission as the spread of democracy. But Packer also notes that the neocons' ideas probably wouldn't have made much of an impact if the Sept. 11 attacks hadn't taken place. Perle said, "It wasn't the arguments or the positions held by me, or Paul, or anyone else before that. The world began on nine-eleven. There's no intellectual history."
There may be no intellectual history, but Packer shows how an administration often characterized as anti-intellectual was influenced by men whose ideas were derived from eggheads like University of Chicago professors Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss. And the pro-war arguments that Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor at California State University-Fresno, derived from his study of the ancient Greeks "caught the attention of Vice President Cheney and won the gloomy farmer-professor with the taste for warmongering rhetoric a dinner invitation to the White House."
But the substance of Packer's book is not in the theorizing but in the actuality of what happened, the way the initial success -- when the president could pose before a "Mission Accomplished" banner -- quickly soured, a consequence of inadequate planning for what might happen after the invasion. Packer puts together a powerful indictment of those who were unable to see beyond a show-offy beginning of "shock and awe" and prevent chaos and anarchy.
The book is based on Packer's exceptional reporting for the New Yorker, which included several increasingly dangerous visits to Iraq. He anchors a complex narrative with rich and insightful portraits of people caught up in the conflict.
There's Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile whose desire to rid the country of Saddam so outweighed his sense of reality that he told Bush that "people will greet the troops with sweets and flowers." There's Capt. John Prior, a rifle company commander who grows increasingly frustrated with both his superiors and the Iraqis he's trying to help. There's Chris Frosheiser, an Iowan struggling to make sense of the war after his soldier son is killed. And there are many other policymakers, soldiers and -- until the chaos in Iraq made it too dangerous for Packer to communicate with them -- Iraqi citizens.
Packer's interviews and experiences in Iraq bring him to this conclusion: "Those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one."
Yet for all the harshness of that judgment, "The Assassins' Gate" doesn't read like your usual Bush-bashing screed. In fact, one problem with the book is that the president has so little presence in Packer's narrative -- a consequence of the administration's aloofness from criticism.
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Packer has his own take on Bush, of course, and it doesn't differ much from the usual criticisms: "Bush's war, like his administration, like his political campaigns, was run with his own absence of curiosity and self-criticism, his projection of absolute confidence, the fierce loyalty he bestowed and demanded," Packer writes. And he makes a pointed comparison to an earlier wartime president, noting that Bush didn't wait up "past midnight like Lyndon Johnson in the Situation Room, the lines visibly deepening in his face, for the body count to come in. Not knowing was part of the strategy for victory."
But given the depth of the other profiles in the book, the sketchiness of Packer's portrait of Bush leaves his narrative almost like "Hamlet" without the prince. With one important difference: Hamlet's tragedy was that he couldn't make up his mind. Bush's tragedy may be that he can't change his.
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