Book Review: Assassin’s Gate

This is the sixth of an eight part review series of the Patterson Summer Reading List.

1. Colossus, Niall Ferguson
2. Illicit, Moises Naim
3. The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs
4. The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman
5. The Persian Puzzle, Kenneth Pollack
6. George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate

Assassin’s Gate is authored by George Packer, a “liberal hawk” who supported the intervention in Iraq and who remains unconvinced that a) it has irrevocably failed, or b) that it had to fail. Like all perspectives, this one is limiting, but it does allow him to concentrate on the disastrous ineptitude of the occupation without having to deal with the question of whether or not the endeavour was doomed from the beginning. As an aside, I am unconvinced that the Iraq operation was doomed to failure from conception, but I believed then and believe now that the Bush administration was utterly incapable of doing the necessary work; an administration that didn’t believe in governance, couldn’t be bothered to make the compromises and deals necessary to assemble multilateral support, and consistently subverted every project, foreign and domestic, to partisan political gain shouldn’t have been trusted to run a Quiznos, much less rebuild a country. This should have been obvious to Packer, Beinart, and the boys at TNR at the time, but I digress…

Packer effectiveley reminds us of the claims made by war advocates prior to the war. Hawks did not, as they are so fond of claiming now, simply suggest that Iraq and Al Qaeda had a history of mild cooperation checkered by often violent disagreement. Rather, they asserted a strong operational relationship between the two, one that had been important in the past and would extend into the future. With due apologies to Stephen Hays, they did not limit their claim to allegations that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated in the mid-1990s on radio broadcasts, or that an occasional Al Qaeda operative found a temporary haven in Iraq. At the Weekly Standard and Fox News, “connection” pimps have established a “Hussein and Al Qaeda never cooperated at all” strawman that they’ve taken delight in tearing down. They remain unable to substantively deal with the actual situation; in spite of having the bulk of the Hussein regime and much of Al Qaeda subject to interrogation, and of having most of the security files of the former, no one has been able to establish any linkage of real operational significance between the two. The question of weapons of mass destruction has developed similarly, and again Packer reminds us of the actual claims made by the administration and its enablers, which remain quite indefensible even in the face of such “discoveries” as 500 artillery shells spread about the country, none of which still had active chemical elements, or the occasional Iraqi source who insists, never with any evidence, that he personally saw the weapons transferred to Syria. Indeed, it would have been better had Packer assessed those claims as critically in 2003 as he does now, but that’s a conversation for another day.

Packer also gives a multifacted account of the war, speaking with individuals with a host of different viewpoints on the war. This includes neocon intellectuals, US military officers and enlisted personnel, Iraqi exiles, aid workers, and Iraqis from all walks of life. To his credit, Packer doesn’t try to synthesize all of this into a single lesson about either Iraq or the more general question of democratization through force, instead allowing the reader to intepret as s/he will. Packer understands that there is no single story of the Iraq War, and that even by talking to as many people from as many different places as possible, he can’t establish the definitive meaning of the conflict. The people he speaks with, even in Iraq, stand on different sides on the question of the wisdom of the conflict, with some dying, some jubilant, and others just trying to get by. I think that the account does get at the basic unseriousness of those who planned the conflict, including both civilian and military personnel who didn’t have the faintest idea of what they were doing or of the very serious consequences of their failures. For example, one group in the Pentagon thought that they key to pacifying Iraq would be the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy to Baghdad…

A good general narrative of the staging of the war and its aftermath runs through the book, which makes it very effective as a text of the occupation. I suspect that Assassin’s Gate will have a limited shelf-life, as it provides no earthshattering insights, and does not offer a detailed history of any specific part of the campaign. On the other hand, Packer may be able to return to the subject in a couple of years, finding new viewpoints or revisiting old ones. In any case, Assassin’s Gate is well worth a read today.