The road to hell

Packer's attitudes and beliefs about the war play a curious, elusive role in "The Assassins' Gate." He does not foreground them, but neither does he shrink from revealing them. What makes those beliefs hard to pin down is that some -- but not all -- of them changed in the course of his experiences, and Packer does not always inform us of when. To paraphrase the old line about Nixon, it is difficult to know what Packer knew and when he knew it.

For example, Packer argues that Bush officials "were peculiarly unsuited to deal with the consequences of the Bush Doctrine" because, as Cold War hawks and believers in the unfettered use of American power, they had "sat out the debates of the 1990s about humanitarian war, international standards, nation building, democracy promotion ... When September 11 forced the imagination to grapple with something radically new, the president's foreign-policy advisors reached for what they had always known. The threat, as they saw it, lay in well-armed enemy states. The answer, as ever, was military power and the will to use it."

This analysis is acute, and it goes a long way to explaining the Bush administration's failures in the post-invasion period. But Packer does not tell us when he reached this conclusion about Team Bush. Did he know it from the start, but decided to support the war anyway, because "one doesn't get one's choice of wars"? Or did he only reach it after the fact?

Packer's decision not to emphasize his own place in the narrative is understandable, and mostly laudable. "The Assassins' Gate" is mainly a work of history, and an exceptionally reliable one. All that matters in historical works is whether something is true, not when the historian learned it. But insofar as the book is about Packer's own beliefs, and insofar as those beliefs shed light on a whole set of arguments about the wisdom and morality of the Iraq war, the question does matter. To understand those beliefs, we must look more closely at the two figures that guided and defined them before the war: Kanan Makiya and Paul Berman. How much Packer still subscribes to their ideas is one of the lingering questions left by his book: It is possible that he does not know himself.

That Packer was drawn to Makiya is not surprising. Of all those who argued for the war, Makiya was by far the most convincing. A brilliant, impassioned writer who refused to allow the West to forget the dreadful crimes of Saddam Hussein, who argued that the Iraqi people deserved a Western-style democracy, his support for the war carried the stamp of moral authority. Packer noticed Makiya walking around Cambridge, Mass., where Packer was living at the time, and introduced himself. So begins a relationship that runs like a unifying thread through the book. Makiya is Virgil to Packer's Dante, a man whose unimpeachable decency, idealism and courage coexists with a naiveté verging on myopia and -- it turns out -- a near-complete lack of knowledge of the land he had fled so many years before.

Much of the pathos of "The Assassins' Gate" derives from Packer's increasing realization that Makiya's beautiful vision bore no connection to reality. Over the course of his reporting from Iraq, Packer realized just how disconnected from Iraq Makiya was. As the situation in Iraq deteriorated in the summer after the invasion, Packer ran into his mentor in Baghdad. Makiya was working on a project called the Memory Foundation, a memorial to the dreadful decades of Saddam's rule which he hoped would "[reshape] Iraqis' perceptions of themselves in such a way as to create the basis for a tolerant civil society that is capable of adjusting to liberal democratic culture."

By now, Packer has little patience for such projects, however well-meaning. "Makiya was consumed with thoughts about the past and the future; I wanted him to acknowledge that the present was a disaster. Phrases like 'tolerant civil society' and 'liberal democratic culture' did not inspire me in Baghdad in the summer of 2003. They sounded abstract and glib amid the daily grinding chaos of the city, and they made me angry at him and myself -- for I had had my own illusions."

By the end of the book, Packer seems to have come to terms with Makiya's doomed idealism: The book closes with the exile's ambiguous self-description: "I think it was Ahmad who once said of me that I represent the triumph of hope over experience."

Of course, urging war on the basis of a foolish hope is more excusable coming from Kanan Makiya than it is from an American. Iraq is not our country, and while it may be true that we are all our brothers' keepers, only the most internationalist of altruists would demand that a nation sacrifice its own interests for the sake of an oppressed foreign country. Although at times Packer seems close to being that kind of altruist, he also believes -- or at least believed -- not only that invading Iraq was the right thing to do for the Iraqi people, but also that it was in America's own interests. To understand his thinking, we must examine the ideas of Paul Berman, echoes of whose ideas can be found in "The Assassins' Gate."

Packer recounts how he came to know Berman. "[E]xtraordinary times call for new thinking. Searching for a compass through the era just begun, I was drawn to people who thought boldly. One of them was the writer Paul Berman, who was working out a theory about what was now being called the war on terrorism." Berman was Packer's neighbor in Brooklyn, and Packer would meet with Berman over late-night dinners at a neighborhood bistro, where the older man would expound on his ideas.

Next Page: Packer, Paul Berman and the case for a "vibrant, hardheaded liberalism"

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