REVIEW By Tom Gallagher

lit@sfbg.com

In a conflicted New Yorker writer struggles with the Iraq conflict

The Assassins' Gate,

In writing The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, New Yorker staff writer George Packer has achieved the rare feat of producing a book that may allow the reader to understand its subject better than the author himself seems to. We may acknowledge Packer's pluck and determination in making four trips to Iraq since the invasion and enjoy the results, even if he did draw the book's most emblematic vignette – the soldier shouting to an angry crowd following the fall of Baghdad, "We're here for your fucking freedom, now back up" – from CNN, rather than on-the-spot reporting. We can even rejoice in his partial recognition of just what a truly terrible proposition the invasion was, but overall, it isn't debunking on Packer's part that reveals the shoddiness of the justifications for the war so much as his advocacy of them.

One thing for sure is that he doesn't like to admit he was wrong. His Oct. 13, 2005, Los Angeles Times opinion piece tells us that in the months leading up to the invasion, the war "forced on all of us F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous test of a first-rate intelligence: 'the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,'<\!q>" whereas "the mark of second-rate minds was absolute certainty one way or the other." To Packer, "what you thought about the war mattered less to me than how you thought about it." So his "most heated and confounding arguments over the war occurred when there was no one else around" – presumably a successful strategy for avoiding second-rate minds.

Eventually he "came down on the pro-war side," but only "by a whisker" because he "understood the risks and costs," and in this he distinguishes himself from those fixed opponents of the war – whose assumptions, the book says, "were based on moral innocence – on an inability to imagine the horror in which Iraqis lived" – even if he now recognizes that, so far as America goes, the invasion should not "have been done at all."

We at home can only benefit from reading more about what our military does and experiences out there – and never more so than when an all-volunteer army means that large sections of the population have no direct contact with the tiny minority charged with carrying out government policy at the point of a gun, and Packer provides an on-the-ground picture by no means as universally unflattering as the episode cited above. The more we know the names and origins of our soldiers, the more we understand why it's not generals who fret about America having "a strong disinclination to risk life in battle," but New York Times book reviewers.

Packer also met the civilian occupiers. A British official in Kirkuk who actually opposed the invasion "found American nationalism, with its sunny certainties and its zeal, a strange and troubling force," while Iraqis, for their part, complained that "Americans were both too soft and too hard. Niceness and nastiness seemed to be two conjoined sides of their personality: Love me or I'll kill you." On the other hand, "the British troops in the south [of Iraq] ... seemed far more comfortable with the inherent ambiguities of police work and civil affairs" – a legacy of past empire; some even had experience in occupying Northern Ireland. And then there was the lighter side: "A twenty-five year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market," Packer writes, "and another twenty-five year-old helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application."

Through it all, Packer evinces such a sense of shock that the occupation is not running along lines he'd like to see that you have to wonder just who this "liberal hawk," as he calls himself, thought was in the White House when all this was going on. And he's not much more astute about the Democrats: In discussing their 2004 presidential primary campaign, he writes that "an informed assessment leading to the conclusion that the American presence could only make matters worse, with no chance of a turnaround, deserved a hearing. But what the Democrats offered was something else: a detached and complacent negativism." Actually, Dennis Kucinich articulated such "an informed assessment" from the beginning of the primary season to the end, but Packer had dismissed him 300 pages earlier as "the elfin, jug-eared congressman from Cleveland who was hinting that he might launch an antiwar campaign for president." There were many reasons why Kucinich's candidacy never took off, but the refusal of mainstream journalists to pay it any heed certainly counts large among them.

Packer also took domestic excursions to places as strange, in their way, as post-invasion Iraq: into the minds of some of the war's architects and supporters, who have twisted Patrick Henry's sentiment into a foreign policy that delivers the Islamic world the message "We'll give you liberty or we'll give you death." There will be some difference of opinion as to the quality of the liberty it has provided, but there can be none about the death it has delivered.

One group he particularly dwells on is the "liberal veterans of humanitarian war [who] became uneasy allies of administration hawks." These were not actually the wounded or decorated soldiers the everyday world understands as "veterans," but intellectuals – "laptop bombardiers" as their detractors call them. Seemingly but dimly aware of the specific events of, and the West's overall role in, Yugoslavia's unraveling, they viewed the US bombing of Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo war as a paradigm of American military intervention to democratize the world. Paul Berman, something of a mentor to Packer, explains that "the Islamist movement" was guided by "totalitarianism," an ideology that represented "a revolt against liberalism," to which the proper response was "liberalism armed." Through it all, Packer apparently notices none of the "moral innocence" of the anti-Iraq war protesters in Berman's Brooklyn apartment.

Packer himself calls military campaigns like the invasion of Iraq "wars of choice" without the slightest trace of irony. His understandably negative view of Saddam Hussein's government seemingly blinds him not only to the fact that international law characterizes such invasions as "wars of aggression," but also to the underlying reason – that legitimizing them represents a step backward toward a worldwide law of the jungle, in which the might of the larger country determines what's right for the smaller. And he reminds us that whether or not George W. Bush actually lied about the "weapons of mass destruction" intelligence reports, as far as some Democrats went, he needn't have; as Packer told the San Francisco Chronicle, "WMD never persuaded me." But then, presidential candidate John Kerry already told us he'd still have supported the war if the facts had been available.

Packer's faulting the Bush administration's failure "to frame the new war against Islamic radicalism as a national struggle" seems stunningly tin-eared coming from someone who writes for a publication that sets the nation's standard for precision and style in writing. A merciful editor might have suggested that if he would only substitute "Christian" or "Jewish" for "Islamic" he'd understand how this declaration of war reads in the Muslim world.

What does not figure at all in Packer's telling of the invasion is economic calculation, despite his description of the vision that former undersecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz entertained of "a realignment of American power and influence in the Middle East, away from theocratic Saudi Arabia ... and toward a democratic Iraq." Some reporters might have found it strange for the United States to start a campaign to democratize the Middle East by invading enemy Iraq when it could instead prod Saudi Arabia, an ally largely dependent upon American weaponry – unless, of course, the certitude of a reliable petroleum source was a major concern. Packer is unfazed, though, and his only hint of the issue comes in a mention of demonstrators from "extremist groups" carrying banners "that proclaimed 'No Blood for Oil.'<\!q>"

In the end, the real fault Packer finds with the Bush administration is that it failed to send enough troops. In an Oct. 24, 2005, New Yorker piece, he suggested that Democrats campaign in 2006 on the pledge that they "will rebuild the armed forces – making it at least possible for the Iraq insurgency to be defeated." Last November's Iraq reconciliation conference, at which Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis all agreed that "national resistance is a legitimate right of all nations," suggests, though, that this might not be shrewd advice. But if you want to understand why Iraq – and America – are in the shape they're in, it will be quite worth your while to pick up The Assassin's Gate, read it, and weep – for both our countries.

Tom Gallagher is a San Francisco writer and a frequent contributor to Lit.