Book Review
Etiology of a War
By Charles Meyer, M.D.
The Assassins’ Gate is a primer on the thinking that led us into war and a glimpse at the quagmire that won’t let us out.
March 20, 2006, will mark the third anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. As I write this in January, each day brings news of the vicious monotony of car bombings, the political jockeying of Iraqi factions, and the ominous sense that Iraq is a long way from peace and prosperity. Yet each day also brings reassurances from the Bush administration that Iraq is moving toward stability, that recent elections confirm that the plan for exporting democracy to Iraq is working, and that history will judge the invasion of Iraq a triumph of American foreign policy. Advocates of either interpretation would acknowledge that events since March 2003 have not unfolded as anybody planned or predicted and a substantial proportion of Americans wonder how we got from the smoke and unity of Sept. 11, 2001, to the financial hemorrhaging and escalating questioning of January 2006.
In his book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, George Packer, a New Yorker staff writer, tells the story of the journey from the World Trade Center to Baghdad. In the first section of the book, Packer traces the careers and thinking of the main administration proponents of the war—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, whose war advocacy grew from different motivations but coalesced in the common goal of regime change. “For Feith and Wurmser,” Packer writes, “the security of Israel was probably the prime mover. But for others, such as Wolfowitz, Iraq stood for different things—an unfinished war, Arab tyranny, weapons proliferation, a strategic threat to oil, American weakness, Democratic fecklessness.”
Packer is clear that the invasion of Iraq was a dream in Bush circles in 2001 and a definitive plan by 2002. He writes: “By the early spring of 2002, a full year before the invasion, the administration was inexorably set on a course of war.” Still, after all his investigations and writing, the core reason for the war eludes Packer, and he writes toward the end of the first section of the book, “Why did the United States invade Iraq? It still isn’t possible to be sure—and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War.”
Murky motives and the shifting sands of 21st century geopolitics led to strange ideological alliances in the Iraq War, he asserts. “Old-fashioned realists from the Republican establishment found themselves on the same side of the debate as anti-imperialist leftists and far-right isolationists, while liberal veterans of humanitarian war became uneasy allies of administration hawks.” Indeed, Packer’s description of his own position seems ambiguous and hedged. “To give my position a label, I belonged to the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently prowar liberals, who supported a war by about the same margin that the voting public had supported Al Gore. This position descended from the interventions of the last decade in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. … I wanted Iraqis to be let out of prison; I wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before he committed mass murder again; I wanted to see if an open society stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world.” For Packer, as for many of the thinkers he describes, Iraq is odd-shaped peg that fits no pre-existing hole.
The Assassins’ Gate’s second section portrays post-invasion Iraq through profiles of individuals. To feel the pulse of the American military, Packer followed Charlie Company and its leader Capt. John Prior as they struggled with the difficulties of acting both as police officers and civil engineers—interacting with a suspicious population, mediating arguments over stolen diesel fuel, and trying to repair sewers, electrical grids, and schools. In an attempt to understand the Iraqi population, Packer befriended, among others, an Iraqi female student, who is yearning for a view of the outside world yet yoked to Islamic tradition, and a forensic pathologist, who deals with carnage rolling through his doors while he performs virginity checks mandated by Islamic law. What emerges is a population torn apart by war, ambivalently loving and hating their liberators/occupiers, and inextricably bonded to the rule of Islam.
What also becomes apparent is that the ideology that drove the architects of the war gradually got buried in the rubble of Iraq’s infrastructure, and Iraqis’ belief in Americans increasingly hinged not on democracy but on electricity. The failure to rebuild that infrastructure and secure the streets has spawned the insurgency that undermines the U.S. effort with each car bombing, assassination, or beheading. The roots of the insurgency are as intricate as the roots of the war—residual Baathist leaders, emerging Sunni religious and political activism, and an infiltration of outside al-Qaeda operatives. Packer doesn’t dodge this complexity but deftly analyzes it. He also teases apart the administration’s attitude toward the insurgency, which started as denial and moved to a fumbling attempt to contain what he calls the “war after the war.”
For many who lived through the Vietnam war, the parallels with Iraq seem obvious and painful. Packer writes about many of these, including the U.S. reluctance to recognize a guerrilla warfare response, the delayed acknowledgement that a low-tech winning of the hearts of Iraqis was as important as a high-tech military conquest, and the submerging of bad news from the front. When he quotes American soldiers trying to distinguish between good and bad Iraqis, the specter of the Vietcong floats into view. “The same guy that waves at you can shoot you with an RPG,” he writes. Yet Packer rejects the Vietnam comparison, stating, “I knew that it was a limited analogy, more useful for polemic than insight.” But then he writes, “Iraq did feel like Vietnam. The Americans were moving half-blind in an alien landscape, missing their quarry, and leaving behind frightened women and boys with memories.”
For readers looking for a bare, chronological case history of the Iraq war, The Assassins’ Gate will disappoint. The history is there, but Packer laces it with impressions, anecdotes, interviews, and personalities. For those who want insight into the etiology of the conflict and a glimpse at the symptoms of the disease, it is a good primer.
The Assassins’ Gate draws its title from the sandstone arch that forms the main entry to the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad, the center of American operations and a haven protected from the messiness that is still Iraq. The book is a saga of an administration cut off from the reality of the people they intended to liberate and still looking for a final chapter that will leave Iraq better than it was in March 2003. MM
Charles Meyer is editor in chief of Minnesota Medicine.