The road to hell

Packer describes how the Bush administration began taking steps to invade Iraq almost immediately after 9/11. (Packer notes that, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recounted, Bush officials were talking about removing Saddam almost as soon as Bush took office in January 2001.) This is familiar territory, but as usual Packer provides some unusual insights. He notes that Bush and Wolfowitz, in particular, bonded: "They believed in the existence of evil, and they had messianic notions of what America should do about it." In March 2002, Bush interrupted a meeting between Condoleezza Rice and three senators to say, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out."

As plans for war raced ahead, a secret new unit was being set up in the Pentagon, overseen by Douglas Feith and his deputy, William Luti, who was such a maniacal hawk that his colleagues called him "Uber-Luti." (At a staff meeting, Luti once called retired Gen. Anthony Zinni a traitor for questioning the Iraq war.) The secret unit was called the Office of Special Plans, and it was charged with planning for Iraq. Packer's account of this office is chilling. Its main purpose was to cook up intelligence to justify the war, which was then "stovepiped" directly to Dick Cheney's neocon chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby (who has now been linked to the Valerie Plame scandal). Its cryptic name as well as its opposition to the traditional intelligence agencies, which had failed to deliver the goods on Saddam, reflected the views of its director, Abram Shulsky, a former Perle aide, housemate of Wolfowitz's at Cornell, and student of the Chicago classics professor Leo Strauss. Strauss, around whom a virtual cult had gathered, had famously discussed esoteric and hidden meanings in great works, and Shulsky wrapped himself in the lofty mantle of his former professor to justify the secret and "innovative" approach of the OSP.

In fact, besides feeding bogus intelligence from Iraqi exile sources into the rapacious craw of the White House, the OSP was nothing but a spin machine to prepare the way to war: No actual "planning" was done. According to Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, the "crafting and approval of the exact words to use when discussing Iraq, WMD, and terrorism were, for most of us, the only known functions of OSP and Mr. Shulsky." (Kwiatkowski later recalled a bit of advice she got from a high-level civil servant: "If I wanted to be successful here," she wrote, "I'd better remember not to say anything positive about the Palestinians.")

The OSP also recruited several Middle East experts, including Harold Rhode, a protégé of the Princeton Arabist Bernard Lewis. Rhode, whose keen grasp of regional realities was reflected in his musing that one way to transform the Middle East would be to change the Farsi alphabet in Iran to Roman, was an ardent proponent, like other neocons, of installing Ahmad Chalabi as prime minister -- thus restoring Shiites to power. "Shiite power was the key to the whole neoconservative vision for Iraq," Packer notes. "The convergence of ideas, interests, and affections between certain American Jews and Iraqi Shia was one of the more curious subplots of the Iraq War ... the Shia and the Jews, oppressed minorities in the region, could do business, and ... traditional Iraqi Shiism (as opposed to the theocratic, totalitarian kind that had taken Iran captive) could lead the way to reorienting the Arab world toward America and Israel."

But the neocons had a far darker view of Islam and the Muslim world as a whole. "A government official who had frequent dealings with Feith, Rhode and the others came up with an analogy for their attitude toward Islam: 'The same way evangelicals in the South wrestle with homosexuals, they feel about Muslims -- people to be saved, if only they would do things on our terms. Hate the sin, love the sinner."

With Pentagon planning for a U.S. invasion of a major Arab state in these capable hands, those who were actually working on real plans -- and knew what they were talking about -- were cut out of the process. The State Department's Future of Iraq Project, run by a competent analyst named Tom Warrick, addressed many of the concrete issues that would ultimately bedevil the occupation. But the Pentagon and the White House mistrusted the State Department, which was filled with Arabists and thus ideologically suspect. And the coup de grâce was administered by none other than the lofty idealist turned practical politician Kanan Makiya. Makiya, who had emerged from obscurity to find himself courted by the White House and a figure with influence at the highest levels of the U.S. government, had made the fateful decision to form an alliance with Ahmad Chalabi (Makiya told another Iraqi exile that "Iraq has one democrat -- Ahmad Chalabi"), and had decided that the Future of Iraq Project would weaken Chalabi. The Pentagon ordered the Future of Iraq Project's report shelved.

The vindictive pettiness of the Bush administration's hawks was astonishing. Warrick himself, who Packer writes "had done as much thinking about postwar Iraq as any American official," was suddenly removed from Jay Garner's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the predecessor of the Coalition Provisional Authority, at the orders of Dick Cheney, who despised him for ideological reasons. Cheney also ordered the removal of another State Department specialist named Meghan O'Sullivan, because he "disliked some things that O'Sullivan -- a protégé of the ideologically moderate Richard Haass, and therefore suspect -- had written." Know-nothings, true believers and free-market Republicans were installed instead.

Next Page: The administration feared planning for the war might prevent it from happening

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