Book Review: "The Assassin's Gate" by George Packer (paperback version released 2006)

Well, it looks like Michael Ignatieff now has some company as he's not the only public intellectual now reconsidering his support for the Iraq war. Yes, yours truly, quite possibly the most fervent believer in the Administration's efforts to remove Saddam Hussein living north of the 49th parallel, is having a little trouble supporting the whole thing the way I once did ,and it's largely due to material like "The Assassin's Gate" by New Yorker reporter George Packer.

Not a piece of advocacy but refreshingly, journalism in its truest and most authentic sense, Packer begins by weaving the work of Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya who authored the expose "Republic of Fear" in 1989. His sermonizing about the horrors of the butcher of Baghdad soon found a captive audience in certain Washington circles, mostly among the Wolfowitz-Feith-Kristol crowd, who found their champion in Donald Rumsfeld. To his credit (as we all know what happens next), familar arguments about exaggerated intel, selective hearing by the White House, and facile sloganeering like "Bush Lied - Thousands Died" and "No Blood for Oil" are eschewed. Instead, Packer offers an illustration of the extremely troubling extent to which there was absolutely no foresight when it came to post-Saddam planning. As Packer illustrates, the crowd mentioned above seemed uninterested, and at times, proudly so, in alternative views concerning how Iraqis (a mythical term if there ever was one) would respond to a power vacuum. The looting, gangsterism and religious extremism that filled the void after Hussein's downfall, and the honourable yet nearly vain efforts of American men and women in their mid-twenties to try and install some order after their political leadership let them down as masterfully portrayed by Packer left me with a sense of broken faith in the righteousness of the whole endeavour.

After reading this and other accounts, I remain staunchly in favour of the removal of Saddam from power, but although I am an optimist by nature, I view grand schemes with skepticism largely because they fail to incorporate the foibles and shortcomings of human beings laid over top of the intricacies and delicacies that culture and history inflict upon every individual on the face of the Earth.

By ignoring these fundamental realities via their management of the war after Hussein's fall and deludedly holding on to their expectation that modern Western civilization would replicate itself over a period of one thousand days in a place that has never known anything resembling it, Wolfowitz et al. should be ashamed of themselves.

The question the reader is left with after completing Packer's work is thus this: how can one define success in Iraq?

I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question at this point.

Overall rating: 9.5/10