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Books, The Assassins' Gate

Anatomy of a disaster

a book review by Eric Jackson

The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

by George Packer

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (New York 2005)

467 pp., $26 hardcover

ISBN 0-374-29963-3

As a part of the general nastiness that has overtaken US political and social discourse in recent years, there has been a partisan take-no-prisoners warfare against journalism, coming from most sides. For the most part right-wing people watch Fox News and read only the conservative press, and the left doesn't watch Fox and doesn't read right-wing publications. To the extent that people pay attention to media with whose slant they disagree, they are often just looking for errors, weaknesses or ethical breaches to serve as bases for attacks. In the crossfire jobs have been lost, reputations have been destroyed, and the quality of reporting has not been improved.

It just may be, however, that one creepy little corporate pretense that has been critically wounded in this regrettable process won't be missed: the feigning of neutrality by elite journalists. More and more, we are seeing reporters who honestly admit their biases so that people can know from whence they come, and then, bearing their own points of view in mind, do their level best to be fair to those who don't share them.

George Packer, whose book "The Assassins' Gate" tackles the most divisive American issue of our time, did a lot of the work upon which it's based for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is someone who admits his political bias, which is not mine. He's a self-described liberal hawk, someone who thinks that on balance, it was the right thing for the United States to take out Saddam Hussein even if he disagrees with the premises upon which the Bush administration did it. At the time when he stopped writing this book early last year, he saw the debacle and the smashed illusions, yet still held out hope that something good might eventually emerge from them.

Whether you're a conservative hawk, a right-wing isolationist, or like me, a supporter of the antiwar movement, you should not let your political differences keep you from reading this important work of journalism. George Packer tells a story that America and the world need to understand, so that we can all move ahead toward happier days.

The first part of the book is a history of ideas --- of the neoconservative movement and other trends within the Republican Party, of westernized liberal Iraqis and other tendencies within the fractious circles of those who fled into exile from Saddam Hussein's tyranny. Through this history, one is introduced to the major proponents and directors of the Iraq War and their personalities.

Then Packer gets into the war as it unfolded through early 2005, against the backdrops of high-level Washington office politics, an Iraqi public which turned out to be nothing much like the exiles had imagined it to be, proud and brave but frustrated soldiers, and the grieving families of the fallen.

It's an ugly story, one that savages many a high and mighty reputation. Packer isn't the only one telling it, but he tells it comprehensively and well. Though he isn't and won't be a single-handed dragon-slayer, his account is a probable milestone in a process very likely to relegate neoconservatism to that eternal right-wing purgatory where the Laffer Curve and such follies dwell. It's also a guide to the distinctions among GOP factions from some of which, after all the blood is shed and the disgrace is assigned, the new leadership of a post-Bush Republican Party is likely to emerge.

Who comes across as an unprincipled sycophant, a ruthless fanatic, an arrogant manipulator or as a well-meaning person who misjudged a situation you might well guess. But then some of my guesses were, by Packer's lights, very wrong.

And if you are a man or woman of the left, don't just stand aside and snicker. The pathologies that Packer describes also tend to have their mirror images and there are universal lessons that go way beyond partisanship to be learned here.

Read this book above all to understand how the mighty United States got into this sorry mess, because if you don't know what hit you, the next kick is also likely to take you by surprise.