The road to hell

Berman was immersed in the work of the seminal Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb. "Qutb's ideas confirmed the theory that Berman had begun to develop, which was this: The young Arab men who had steered those four airplanes to apocalyptic death were not products of an alien world. They weren't driven by Muslim tradition, or Third World poverty, or the clash of civilizations, or Western imperialism. They were modern, and the ideology that held them and millions of others across the Islamic world in its ecstatic grip had been produced by the modern world -- in fact, by the West. It was the same nihilistic fantasy of revolutionary power and mass slaughter that, in the last century, drove Germans and Italians and Spaniards and Russians (and millions of others across the world) to similar acts of apocalyptic death. This ideology had a name: totalitarianism."

Packer writes that he was drawn to the fierce intensity of Berman's intellectual quest and found his ideas compelling. "I listened, occasionally asking a skeptical question, admiring the dedication of his project (who else was really trying to figure this stuff out?), mostly sympathizing -- but also worrying about Berman's tendency toward sweeping, distinction-erasing intellectual moves. What, for example, did his theory have to do with Iraq?" The answer Berman gave was simple. Both Islamism and Saddam's Stalinist state were totalitarian, implacably opposed to liberal societies, to freedom itself, and so they had to be opposed just as Hitler and Stalin had to be opposed.

"He was responding viscerally to the event (our late-night talks kept coming back to the scale of destruction just across the East River, shocking evidence of the Islamists' ambition) and also at an extremely high level of abstraction, where details become specks," writes Packer in "The Assassins' Gate." This passage foreshadows what Packer was soon to discover: that Berman's grand ideas would not survive contact with Iraq. (It would have been more accurate if Packer had substituted the word "reality" for "details.") But at the time Berman and Packer were discussing these ideas -- late 2002 and early 2003 -- he subscribed to them.

In 2003 Packer edited "The Fight Is for Democracy," a collection of essays by contrarian liberals, including Berman, many of them pro-war. In his introduction, Packer called for a "vibrant, hardheaded liberalism" that is willing to embrace the use of American military power and that stands up unapologetically for democratic values. The key test of this "vibrant liberalism" was the coming war in Iraq. For Packer, as for Berman, Iraq was the first front in a noble and necessary war between democracy and an absolute ideology of control and death.

"The fight against political Islam isn't a clash of civilizations, and it isn't an imperialist campaign," noted Packer in "The Fight Is for Democracy." "As Paul Berman writes, it is a conflict of ideologies and they come down to the century-old struggle between totalitarianism and liberal democracy." The key concept here is the seemingly innocuous expression "political Islam." Like Christopher Hitchens' neologism, "Islamofascism," what this phrase did was allow Packer and Berman to lump al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein together as part of the same threat -- an obviously important move if one is trying to justify invading Iraq, which had no actual connection to al-Qaida.

Berman's convoluted attempt to connect Saddam's secular Baath Party and the Islamist al-Qaida is a feat worthy of a medieval schoolman. But at bottom, it is simply a fancier version of the justification for war put forward by another liberal hawk, Thomas L. Friedman. Friedman also advocated toppling Saddam, but not because of some supposed ideological or historical connection between Baathism and Islamism. His argument was more straightforward: A "terrorism bubble" had built up in the Arab world, and it needed to be popped. As a convenient evil tyrant, Saddam simply offered a good opportunity for the United States to smash the Arab world in the face and teach it a lesson. Neither Friedman nor Berman ever explained exactly how smashing the Arab world in the face was going to turn it away from Islamist radicalism, or why the dubious attempt to install democracy by force in a fractured, wounded land with a bitter experience of colonial rule was worth risking thousands of American lives for. But intoxicated by what he with typical self-critical honesty called "the first sip of this drink called humanitarian intervention," and fastidiously put off by what he perceived as the crudeness of the antiwar movement, Packer signed on for the crusade.

It is scarcely necessary to point out that history has not been kind to the ideas of the liberal hawks. The Arab world, far from falling on its knees in "awe" before American might, as neocon analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht predicted, hates us more than ever. The terror bubble has not been popped: In fact, the Iraq invasion has only increased the danger of terror attacks, according to numerous studies. (And not just studies: The postwar terror attacks in London, Madrid and Bali hardly support the bomb-'em-to-their-knees argument.) And as for the Iraqi people, so far the war has arguably brought them even greater misery than they experienced under Saddam, at least over an equal period of time. Packer writes in "The Assassins' Gate" that "no Iraqi I knew" ever said things were better under Saddam, but Anthony Shadid talked to several Iraqis who said exactly that -- and that was before the situation in Iraq got even worse. To be sure, in the long run the war may prove to have improved their lot. But if a civil war breaks out -- if it has not already done so -- even the humanitarian moral scales will tip irrevocably against the invasion.

Packer presumably knows all this, but he refuses to admit that the idea of invading Iraq was wrong -- only the execution. "Since America's fate is now tied to Iraq's, it might be years or even decades before the wisdom of the war can finally be judged," Packer writes. "The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is." In other words, it is too soon to say if our national interest has been harmed by the war. Even taking a long historical view, this seems untenably optimistic. For the reasons listed above, and many others -- the damage done to our civil society by a war based on lies not least of them -- the Iraq war has been a debacle probably without precedent in our history. The Iraqi people may eventually find their lot improved, although that is far from certain. But to argue that the invasion could still prove to have been in our interests, that we can still "win" it, is to ascend into the realm of futurist fantasy, like arguing that the Vietnam War could still prove to be a good idea.

Next Page: Packer's support for the war was partly driven by his critique of the antiwar movement

• View blog reactions