The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

This book is not, by a long shot, the last word on the meaning of the overthrow of the Baathist regime in Iraq. However, it is the best description to date of how the idealists who dreamed of a better Iraq, the ideologues who dreamed of a revival of American hegemony, and the inscrutable core of the current administration interacted to produce the looming debacle in Iraq. That Packer still believes in the fight to build a better Iraq (though he now has little but disdain for the Bush administration) is a tribute to the man's idealism. A more cynical person might wonder when Packer is going to wise up about the prospects of Iraq being anything more than another unhappy Islamist state for a generation or so. This is speaking as someone show more who did believe that there was something to the humanitarian interventionist argument. show less

They lose faith in us by the minute: My headline is a quote from the book and refers to Iraqis' attitude soon after the invasion. The level of neglect and incompetence was beyond belief and gave rise to the most amazing conspiracy theories.
Packer describes his own pre-war attitude as "ambivalently pro-war liberal", meaning he came somehow from the same direction as Tony Blair, who publicly based his support for the invasion mainly on the human rights view that the regime needed to be removed (that's at least what he said after the wmd scam was destroyed). I can respect that, although I never bought it. My main objection always has been, that I did not trust the invaders to do the job.
One of the main themes of the book is to show how show more the main leaders of the invasion never wanted to do more than invade, assuming or believing, on whatever basis, that things would be alright once liberation was achieved. Rumsfeld's dictum that "bad things happen" when people are free exemplifies this attitude. I assume he meant that good prevails in the end. Well, it does not seem to do so.
I wish I could feel good about this "told you so" attitude of mine. The situation is too damaging to enjoy having been right.
The book is worth reading for mainly two reasons: it gives a broader overview of the political schools of thought involved in the run up debates, in this way tracing the motives for the war. I became more clearly aware of the two different reasons to want to invade, i.e. the neocons' national missionarydom and the hawkishness of the human rights school. I think Packer describes this process very fairly, although it is obvious where his sympathies are. I also learned to be aware about the two opposing historic analogies that were used in the debate: pro war positions referred to the Munich appeasement before WWII, while anti war debaters spoke about the Tonkin deception which led to a larger engagement in Vietnam.
Second reason to read the book: it shows how the lack of planning for "phase IV", i.e. the time after the victory of the invasion, led to the downward spiral of destruction and murder that we are observing now. I find the current debates, whether this is civil war already or not yet, utterly ridiculous.
The sad thing is that this kind of book will be wasted on the true believers of the government line. Just look at the recent review here who found the book "too liberal". show less

George Packer's reporting brings the human element back into the Iraq narrative. His book is partly about the ignorance, incompetence and corruption typical of the Bush administration in Iraq, partly it is a prism of US and Iraqi voices struggling for survival. While the neo-con initiation of the war is a gripping read, it is old news. What I find interesting in the book, is the amount of space Packer dedicates to present the different viewpoints of ordinary Iraqis who normally appear only as numbers and props in the American narrative. We learn about their challenges and moods of optimism and despair in a time of war and occupation. Surprisingly (but typically American), he ends his gory tale with a sunny, idealistic outlook to which show more history has not been kind. Packer still is an idealist, something all the blood spilt has not changed. show less

George Packer does a very good job tracing the ideological and political reasons behind the war, in particular the part that neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith played. He also details in heart-breaking detail the incompetence with which the 'post-war' has been executed.

Packer excels, howver, with his repeated interviews with Iraqis and soldiers that humanize the war in a way no one else has done by following about a dozen Iraqis through a series of interviews over a period of some two years. As a non-embedded reporter for the New Yorker magazine he was able to talk to Iraqis in their own homes (at least until things really fell apart and it became too unsafe for him and them to have an American visit their homes). The show more reader ends up deeply caring about these Iraqis after their long suffering under Saddam and now the war and 'post' war. I couldn't escape the thought that they deserve a better end than they are likely to get.

I found myself also wanting to read more about the war and by Packer. Fortunately, Packer continues to write about Iraq for the New Yorker.

The Assassin's Gate is a great work of extended journalism written under extremely difficult conditions. Not a happy story, but hugely important and informative. show less

Most people, I think, want the Iraq War to be simple. Depending on your ideology, it's a mistake that started with lies, or a determined war for democracy.

George Packer demonstrates convincingly that either position is a vast oversimplification. There were many reasons people wanted to or decided to go to war, and there were many reasons that things went wrong.

Once the war is underway, the book documents the downward spiral that has led us to the current situation of civil war. Packer explores all the complexity and contradictions of the reality of Iraq, its shattered politics and broken people. He details the hard work of ordinary Iraqs, the CPA, and the American soldiers on the ground.

In terms of analysis, there are a few main show more themes:

1. The understanding of the realities of 21st century Iraq under Saddam was very poor outside of the country. In particular, Iraq exiles had rather lofty and unrealistic expectations of a democratic flowering that would fill the void immediately after Saddam was removed.

2. It seems clear that the plan at the top of the American administration was to get rid of Saddam and immediately replace him with a compliant Iraqi puppet government, led by Chalabi. Because of this, there was no plan for the post-war. They had assembled a small team that was supposed to hand everything over to the Iraqis, that was the entire plan.

As the situation changed on the ground, the reality filtered up to the top of the American leadership only in vague and distorted ways, and the postwar turned into bureaucratic bungling and inept management on a grand, tragic scale.

Having gotten to this point, it is really not clear to what extent the entire enterprise can be redeemed. show less

George Packer has written a truly enlightening and intriguing book about our descent into Iraq. Packer is a lucid and engaging writer who can clearly summarize the intellectual debate between the neoconservatives and the realists. It's also a sad book. Learning how policy is arrived out and then justified and implemented can be very discouraging.

The neocons and Bush had decided to go after Iraq for a variety of reasons before 9/11. The concern then became how to sell that decision. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad Paul Wolfowitz fold an interviewer: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S, government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction." show more The real rationale for the war was to realign American power in the Middle East, toward a democratic society and away from Saudi Arabia, home of the Wahhabi sect that virtually controlled Saudi society and government and had been the home to almost all of the 9/11 terrorists. (See Sandra MacKey's very excellent book on Saudi Arabia -- [b:The Saudis Inside the Desert Kingdom|511872|The Saudis Inside the Desert Kingdom|Sandra Mackey|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175397999s/511872.jpg|1488726] -- for a detailed view of what it's like to live in such a theocracy.)

The job then became to selectively use pieces of intelligence that supported their common justification. "Just a year earlier, Iraq had been viewed as an outlaw state that was beginning to slip free of international constraints and might present a threat to the region or, more remotely, the United States in five years or so. Now, suddenly, there wasn't a day to be lost. . . It didn't matter that there was no strong evidence to back up the doomsday prognosis." show less

I thought that while this seemed well researched, and he certainly spent many hours with top commanders and civilian leaders, he seemed enchanted by the CPA and too willing to forgive them their mistakes. He spent very little, if no, time talking about the effect of the war on the average soldier or the lack of effect the war had on the average American. His analysis of intellectuals associated with the war was much too forgiving, especially of liberals. I wanted to read a history of the Assissins' Gate, but what I ended up with was over 400 pages of one man's view based on the personal time he had spent making friends with CPA officials.