Confessions of a humvee liberal: the New Yorker's George Packer has written a penetrating, unblinking account of the catastrophic Iraq war that he supported. He just can't admit he was wrong

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2005 by Michael Hirsh

This an ambitious book, and it succeeds in most of its ambitions. George Packer is the Zelig of the Iraq War. He has been everywhere, it seems, and he has seen the conflict whole. He was there before 9/11, listening to the intellectual arguments of neocons and Iraqi exiles as they won the fight to take on Saddam. He was there in Ramadi and Fallujah as brave but under-supported soldiers like Capt. John Prior lost the fight for Iraqi hearts and minds. He has been in the homes of bereaved fathers like Chris Fmsheiser, whose son was killed by an IED, sharing their raw anguish as they struggle to understand what America is fighting for at all in Iraq.

The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq is the closest thing we have seen to a flail history of the Iraq war, from its murky conceptual beginnings through the Bush administration's still-unexplained failures of planning, up to Iraq's present status as a quasi-quagmire with an unknowable future. Much of Packer's reporting in this book has appeared previously in his long articles in The New Yorker, some of it word for word. But we are lucky to have it back in book form: Packer's tales of Kurdish grievances over Kirkuk, and of his life among occupied Iraqis as their hopes are dashed, are among the most brilliant and evocative accounts of the Iraq war. Packer avoids the pitfalls of the usual reporter's book--which are typically collections of stories or notebook dumps--in part because of his skill as a narrator but also because The Assasins' Gate has a timeless theme: the often heart-wrenching and deadly difference between "abstract terms and concrete realities" "Between them," Packer writes, "lies a distance even greater than the eight thousand miles from Washington to Baghdad."

Packer begins and ends the book with the ultimate abstract dreamer, his friend Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile who is in a way the book's protagonist. We first meet Makiya well before the war, in Cambridge, Mass, in the 1990s, when regime change is still just a gleam in his eye and Packer seeks him out. Writing pseudonymously as Samir al-Khalil, Makiya first alerted the world to the savagery of Saddam's regime when he published Republic of Fear in the late 1980s. Packer's conversations over coffee with the obsessive but endearing Makiya, he says, turned the dream of a new Iraq into a real issue for him. Packer then moves to Brooklyn, where in the runup to the war he bumps, Zelig-like, into liberal intellectual Paul Berman while Berman is wrestling with "a fierce and solitary intensity" over the issue of how to tie the Ba'athism of Saddam together intellectually with the Islamism of Sayyid Quth.

He begins to sense signs of trouble. We next find Packer in London as Iraqi exiles try to piece together a postwar government at the Hilton Metropole. He watches in dismay as Makiya's hopes for a postwar plan are tom apart in a chaotic power grab, and his fellow Iraqis brand him an out-of-touch naif. Meanwhile back home, Dick Cheney is citing Makiya to Tim Russert as one of the Iraqis who has assured him that Americans will "be greeted as liberators."

Then, Packer actually goes to war, and the contrast between the hopeful ideas of his friends and what he finds in Iraq is even more devastating. Watching the tragedy of errors that is the U.S. occupation is like watching a train crash in slow motion when one is powerless to stop it. We've heard this ugly tale many times before, but Packer reports it better than anyone else: The administration's fanciful notion that democracy would somehow be a panacea; its hubris in talking grandly of Iraq's future, then making no plans at all for it; Donald Rumsfeld's profound lack of interest in anything that smacked of peacekeeping or nation-building, and his arrogant state of denial over the insurgency ("Stuff happens," he notoriously says); the inexplicable failure of Paul Wolfowitz, who at least believed in the neocon vision, to make sure it got done in Iraq. ("He had been pursuing this white whale for years, and he had everything to lose if Iraq went wrong," Packer writes. "Why, then, did he find it all so hard to imagine?")

No one escapes whipping here, least of all George W. Bush, whose level of planning involvement is apparently confined to a pathetic line he delivers to Condoleezza Rice in January 2003. According to Packer: "Bush mined to Rice and said, A humanitarian army is going to follow our army into Iraq, right." Right, Rice affirmed, but she glanced down in a way that suggested she knew how inadequate the answer was." Later, as things crone undone, Bush wasn't one for late-night visits to the Situation Room, like the heart-sick Lvndon Johnson during Vietnam: "Not knowing was part of the strategy for victory," Packer writes. "Bush never seemed to be a president under siege. It went wrong only when he missed a detail like the postwar plan."

Back in Iraq, meanwhile, the rumpled, absent-minded Makiya keeps cropping up in the narrative, a case study in how visionaries can ignore reality even when it is blowing up around them. "I wanted him to acknowledge that the present was a disaster," Packer says. "Phrases like 'tolerant civil society' and 'liberal democratic culture' did not inspire me in Baghdad in the summer of 20035 But Packer begins to understand just how little Makiya really knew his own country before, spinning out his dreams in a Cambridge coffee house, and how little he understands it now, ensconced in the Green Zone. "The returned exiles in Baghdad lived in a world apart," Packer writes. "The event that had crashed like a bomb in the lives of other Iraqis, shattering the state and leaving them stunned in the smoke and debris, was to the exiles the opportunity of a lifetime and the fulfillment of a dream."