Book Review: ?The Assassin?s Gate: America in Iraq,? by George Packer

By Nitin Bajaj

 “The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq,” is the tale of America’s involvement in Iraq that began in the March of 2003 and was in the line of decisive actions taken in the aftermath of the “9/11” attacks on the American mainland. This is the story of insidious foreign policy making of the George W. Bush’s administration that would leave irreversible scars on America’s reputation in the world and on the geopolitics of the Middle East.

The author has drawn his seminal work on the thesis of how abstract ideas initiated by a bunch of senior executives shaped the policies of the President of the United States. The effect of such policies that are not based on thorough planning and are devoid of fundamental principles of international relations can lead in to debacles of magnificent scale. The war that was started for a quest to increase and redefine America’s influence in the Middle East – and, not as a primary deterrent against terrorism and nuclear weapons, as is commonly believed – gradually ended up diminishing America’s leverage in the world, and had none of the desired results as were set in the beginning. Therefore, in the author’s words, “It is the story of abstract ideas and concrete realities.” It is apparent that, in this case, an intellectual battle preceded the political and military battle.

The purpose of the book is to underline the main actors and their ideologies that shaped the policies of the President, and to introduce the role of historical perspectives that were central in making those decisions. The war was waged as a result of the assiduous deliberations of the cabinet secretaries and other neo-conservative senior level officials at White House, State Department and the Defense Department. Nevertheless, it blossomed under the tutelage of none other than the then President of United States, George W. Bush. The neo-conservative group of people that proliferated at the higher echelons of the Bush administration fueled the ideas of America’s proactive role in the world, which would eventually lead to America in Iraq. The intellectual spearhead of this movement was none other than the Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. The author defines these neo-conservatives as “the liberals bugged by reality,” and those who shifted to the extreme right of the U.S. political spectrum as a result of the nonchalance of the U.S. Presidents that followed Ronald Reagan. He tracks their roots to the men of Robert Kagan and William Kristol, who, in 1997, had founded the “Project for the New American Century (PNAC),” a foreign policy think-tank for advocacy of America’s uninhibited role in the world for maintaining superior dominance. Most of the PNAC members sympathized with the idea of deposing Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War, and they considered President George H.W. Bush’s not doing so as a grave mistake in 1991. To name a few, the members of PNAC included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Douglas Feith, all of whom went on to become prominent policy makers in the later Bush administration. I believe that the ideology of many of these men can be summed up in the maxim of the 19^th century American philosopher, William James -“The horror is the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis.”[1]

There are two other important parts of the book. One focuses on the irregularities in the functioning of the administration that resulted from the incompatibility between the State Department and the Defense Department. This not only highlights the inability of the President’s command over his bureaucracy but how it eventually led to many bad decisions, which would haunt the President and his subordinates for a long time. The last section of the book discusses the rebuilding efforts in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It points out the obstacles in the path towards instituting democracy in Iraq – many of which, were a result of poor judgments on part of American administrators responsible for Iraq. The ways and means of achieving a democratic Iraq didn’t intersect very often and the resulting situation echoed in a sectarian Iraq. George Packer refers to the men placed in charge of the new Iraqi administration to expose how the efforts in building Iraq went on to ensue a bloody struggle for power in the country. Among them are Paul Bremmer, the first administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq formed by United States, and Andrew Erdmann, a less known senior ministry advisor to the coalition. The author poignantly states, “The cardinal sin of the Americans was to create the conditions for chaos, which would eventually create an atmosphere of sectarian hysteria.” There is also the role of military, which couldn’t provide appropriate security but, nonetheless, there were also people like Colonel H.R. McMaster, who showed exceptional ingenuity by forming local connections in northwestern town of Tal Afar to fight insurgency.

It is a work of objectivity as the author connects it to the events of the past and – more importantly – to the individual ambitions of the men that mattered. Through his many trips to Iraq since the beginning of the war in 2003, George Packer analyses the situations with immense investigative scruple and his personal intellectual sense for international politics. Slated to be amongst the best-known works of history on Iraq War, it finds its audience in all those wanting a definitive account of the narrative. The aim of the book is not only to ascertain the reasons for the American policy failure, but also to raise rational questions, which point us to the alternative scenario that could have been possible. Some of the most important questions being – “Was the insurgency inevitable?” and “Was it possible to start the war with rational justifications rather than false lies?” Though, initially, himself a supporter of the intervention in Iraq, the author doesn’t fall in to the trap of understanding things based on his assumptions. The book abounds with excerpts and conclusions from interviews that the author conducted with a vast number of famous scholars and practitioners of the Middle East and Iraq. Though, a there are few chief sources of the author’s influence and motivation in writing the story of Iraq war. One is the famous Iraqi academic, Kanan Makiya, who wrote one of the best-known internal stories of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime[2]. Another source of influence, with whom the author conducted many number of interviews, is the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, who was famously known for his contrarian and atheist views throughout the western world. The author’s gradual development of logic for why the Iraq war happened is very subtle and comprehensive in its chronological explanations. It is possible to label some of the arguments made in the book as apocryphal but ironically the author’s style of putting them makes them persuasive. I say this, because, the arguments – many times – discredit executives of the Bush administration, but at the end they gravitate towards attacking the general ideas and the systems of the country. To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, “It is always idle to adjudicate upon the right and wrong of people rather than the systems for we are all tarred with the same brush.”[3] Therefore, I think, most of the arguments made in the book arouse genuine discussion and will be saved from the corruption of the clocks.

In the end, it was not an inevitable war that the United States had to fight. But the very play on ideas by a bunch of people – riding on the happenstance of circumstances – succeeded in instigating a nationwide support for their policy. And as the ancient wisdom tells us, the rest of the nation succumbed in their national duty. The obligations that a citizen owes to his state are more binding than those which a child owes his parents or a slave his master[4]. What resulted was an interlude of visionary ideas for a country of 25 million people, which never took a crystallized shape for their welfare.