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Thursday, July 13, 2006

By George Packer ISBN 0-374-29963-3 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 452 pp. Purchase This Book [an error occurred while processing this directive]

George Packer's comprehensive treatise on the Iraq war came out in September 2005 -- before the constitution, before the National Assembly elections, before the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, before the insurgency's full extent and intensity was completely known.

But Packer's prescience, which he had in spades, isn't as important as the sense of history in the book. He provides background on all the major American players (the usual suspects: Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith) as well as the prominent players on the Iraqi side, developing a detailed framework of the prewar build-up and the conflict thus far.

"The Assassins' Gate" -- named for the sandstone arch at the entrance to Baghdad's Green Zone -- has roots in Packer's original reporting for the New Yorker. The magazine's intellectual tenor is evident in the book, and it hangs together as a cohesive narrative.

Packer focuses on preparations for the war and the subsequent occupation; he chooses to omit the better-known facts of the military aspects of the conflict and concentrate instead on small-picture portraits of individuals and the big-picture narrative of the war as a whole. He writes in the introduction, "The road that led America to the Assassins' Gate is long and not at all direct. The story of the Iraq War is a story of ideas about the role of the United States in the world.... It has roots deep in history, yet there was nothing inevitable about the war."

That lack of inevitability, he posits, raises serious questions about the morality of the conflict. Packer said in a November interview on National Public Radio that he was "ambivalent" about the war before it began, but his "hopes slightly overrode [his] fears."

Now, neither Packer nor his book are ambivalent. He thoroughly tears down the Bush administration and its primary players, writing that as the run-up to the war escalated in March 2003, Wolfowitz was "edging toward grandiosity" while Rumsfeld "remained indifferent to the point of negligence." Their lack of prewar planning particularly goads the author, leading him to assert a few pages later that just days before the beginning of the conflict, "the administration remained hopelessly at war with itself. No one in charge was asking the most basic question: what will we do if it all goes wrong?"

At its core, "The Assassins' Gate" is a very personal story. When the NPR host calls it an "angry book" Packer concurs and says both Americans and Iraqis were "betrayed" by administration officials: "They had people's lives in their hands and they didn't treat them with care, and I feel burned by it."

That private tone shows in his surprisingly beautiful, forceful use of language -- and combined with Packer's overriding intelligence and exhaustive firsthand experience with his subject matter, it sets "The Assassins' Gate" apart from many of the Iraq books suddenly crowding the shelves. The book holds up both as a first draft of history as well as a first-person narrative of the war experience, keeping good company with other journalists' personal accounts (for example, Anne Garrels' "Naked In Baghdad" and Anthony Shadid's "Night Draws Near").

Just one criticism: The ending is a little artificial. It's a case of wishful thinking on the author's part; the book doesn't have an end because the war doesn't have an end. It's clear Packer would like that to be different. --Gwen Glazer, NationalJournal.com

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