You Should Probably Watch Creature Comforts

It's like This American Life meets the California Raisins. God bless Aardman.

DH Riley Reviews: The Assasins' Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer

If you're an American, it's pretty likely that you're completely confused by the actions of your government over the past five years. You may support the war in Iraq, you may vote Republican - maybe you have that Weekly Standard pin-up centerfold of Paul Wolfowitz stuck to your bedroom wall. Even so, I can't believe that anyone, anywhere has a completely coherent explanation for why we went to war in Iraq in the way that we did. The policy has been sort of an ugly mash-up of neoconservative idealism, post-Cold-warrior aggression, and - just occasionally - genuine humanitarianism.

Packer puts the pieces together better than anyone else I've read. As the Iraq correspondent for the New Yorker, he's officially broken the record for the number of consecutive "how the hell did he get that written?" articles in that magazine. The Assassins' Gate is partially an attempt to frame those articles in a deeper context, a panoptic viewing of the false assumptions, ham-handed mismanagement, and mutual distrust that brought us to where we are in Iraq. More than anybody writing for the purportedly liberal-elite media, Packer gets inside the heads of folks like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who genuinely believed in the possibility of instant democracy in the Middle East. At one point in Kuwait before the war, a Rumsfeld appointee hushes an intense conversation about reconstructing Iraq's civil society by saying "We don't owe the people of Iraq anything. We're giving them their freedom. That's enough." In eradicating a totalitarian state, we assumed that democratic institutions would naturally fill the vaccuum. Why? Who knows. We read too much John Locke in graduate school, maybe.

In any event, Packer gives a lot of personal thrust to this book - because of his convincing conversations with Iraqi exiles and their accounts of the brutality of Saddam's regime, he's for the war to begin with. He still believes the war is winnable (or at least I think so - the book was written almost two years ago, a lifetime in Iraqi politics these days.) It's also pretty obvious what he thinks of the gross incompetence of the men appointed to make things work in Iraq. Overwhelmingly composed of partisan hacks and Republican bureaucrats, the reconstruction team sets out to finish Rumsfeld's war the way he wants it fought - light, on the cheap, and quickly. This works for at least a month, and then it's downhill from there. Instead of being
responsible for some notion of success or security in Iraq, Bremer and Tommy Franks are held accountable for toeing the line on terrible ideas like debaathification and failing to police Baghdad in the wake of the invasion. No one speaks Arabic; no one knows much about Iraq to begin with - but they do believe in free markets, so there's that.

Packer invests so much time and space in explaining the pro-war rationale that there are tinges of sympathy in his book; he dismisses the legitimate anti-war and Democratic opposition as unserious, which I think is unfair. I don't think a ton of people oppose humanitarian intervention in every circumstance, but there's a perfectly good case to be made that as odious as Saddam was, March 2003 just wasn't the right time to mount a unilateral invasion of an Arab nation. Even with vastly more competent people in charge of the war, I think it still goes to hell at some point, but the US failing the tests over and over and over again certainly didn't help.

The Assassins' Gate will eventually be remembered, I think, as the journalistic classic of the Iraq War. Aside from the top-level stuff I've alreay mentioned, there are great tidbits from Iraqi businessmen, politicians, students, and refugees; the book truly is a distillation of the war from every possible angle. It's a pleasure to read, and it's absolutely essential for anyone who wants to understand the weird places America's been during the Bush years.
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From the Dept. of I Do Not Think That Means What You Think It Means

From Herr Simmons today:

...the overmatched player's union -- led by Billy Hunter and Patrick Ewing, who shouldn't have been trusted to handle a bake sale at an elementary school, much less a labor dispute -- had their ensalada tossed by David Stern...

I hope Messrs. Hunter and Ewing enjoyed themselves, to say the least.