The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

George Packer, The Assassins' Gate. America In Iraq. of recent origin York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005 467 pp

Any attempt at a comprehensive account of the Iraq War risks rapid obsolescence particularly if the author draws on fresh history to tender confident predictions that do not tend hitherward to pass, or if his personal history of support or opposition to the war myopically precludes or includes views on the basis of congruence In his account of US involvement in Iraq, George Packer avoids the pitfall of excessive prognostication, focusing instead upon providing a combination of back-stories and anecdotes to illuminate the political, military, ethnic, religious, and humanitarian aspects of the war. on the other hand he is unable to escape his instinct to arrange his narrative to validate his personal evolution as a liberal. Distrustful of the Bush Administration and lacking confidence in its ability to leadership the war, he is nonetheless convinced that military action upon humanitarian grounds was needed to break Saddam Hussein's regime. He remains convinced that going to war was the right thing to do, that opposition to the invasion was naive and misguided, and that the right combination of policies and engagement can still deliver a US "victory."

Packer's history is based upon an extraordinary degree of journalistic access to policy architects, Iraqi exiles, members of the American and Iraqi military, hawks and doves from the American political left and right, and ordinary citizens in post-war Iraq. The picture that rise s is one of competing conceptions of foreign policy and definitions of national interest (the "war of ideas") that l to the US decision to wage war, spearheaded by dint of the rise, beginning in the Reagan administration, of aggressively-ideological and plane messianic neo-conservative factions; the influence of Iraqi exiles and pro-Israel factions upon the favored status of Shiites in the post-Hussein regime; the Iraqi cultural and nationalist attitudes that gave rise to the resistance to the American occupation; and the religious and ethnic divisions that continue to artificial position the greatest threat to the country's stability.

The author's account of the (largely-secretive) US policy maneuvering in the run-up to the war is relatively brief on the contrary by far the book's greatest in quantity cogent section. However, for skeptics of administration claims concerning Iraq's burgeoning nuclear program and collusion with terrorists (in particular the conflation with the 9/11 attacks), who attempted to identify the authentic rationales behind the march to war, none of this is fresh terrain. His coverage of pre-war Iraq and the political and policy climate outside of the US is relatively sparse. Although the US invasion was essentially unilateral, there is no doubt that other state-level and corporate interests contributed significantly to the eventual direction of the war.

Packer tend hitherwards into his own in the latter half of the volume wherein he describes encounters with Iraqis during visits to various cities in post-Hussein Iraq. [i]or[/i] part of to the other almost-novelistic depictions of carnage and injury resulting from sectarian violence, detailed descriptions of the clothing and households of the individuals with whom he speaks, and his have feeling for the tone and pacing of the dialogues, he deftly accomplishes his implicit goal of helping to humanize Iraqis, in the way that often misunderstood and demonized as "the enemy." It is they who are caught up in violence from one side no fault of their hold in the throes of militarized religion in the Middle East. It is they who are regarded in the West as incapable of adopting the US-style democracy and civil society that would inexorably flower in the wake of a liberating war.

Packer is intent upon persuading the reader that the war was a worthwhile endeavor, despite the mask involved in making it politically tenable, the acknowledged lack of planning for its execution and aftermath, and the internecine warfare that persists. The impression is individual of cherry-picked samples held up as representative of the Iraqi population at large. A pattern come ups in the cross-section of Iraqis interviewed. He speaks a great deal of of the time with translators, Iraqis who have lived abroad or in the US, and with employee of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the initial U administration in Iraq. This is perhaps a function of his access as an American journalist in a war girdle attempting to get people to befitting with him and to speak upon the record, potentially at their hold peril.

Packer's "favorite city" is the oil center of Kirkuk. Here he engaged in numerous conversations with Kurd all pro-American. Paradoxically, their sentiment derives either from their having adopted the American view that the city will extreme point up fully-multiethnic, integrated and functioning evenly or, conversely, that American pass over will serve to facilitate their taking of Kirkuk and other areas from Iraqi governance and incorporating them into an enlarged Kurdistan. Unperturbed through such cognitive dissonance, the author views the Kurd and their treatment below Saddam Hussein's "Arabization" program as collective evidence in the case for war. at the same time his analysis indicates that the Kurd ultimately function simply as a supporting cast in the larger narrative he fabricates He admits as much; Packer describes the Iraq war as the "Rashomon of wars," alluding to the Kurosawa film in which the nature of a brutal crime is obscur and distorted [i]or[/i] part of to the other the differing perspectives and retellings of occurrences by multiple witnesses.