The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  The most important contact Perle made came after Jackson’s death, when he went to work at the Reagan Pentagon and earned a reputation for clinging to decidedly dour views of the Soviet Union’s intentions even as it was palpably weakening and opening up under Gorbachev. (Perle even wrote a novel in which a top arms-control official saves an American president from giving away the whole nuclear arsenal in negotiations with the Soviets—as Perle claimed to have done with Reagan at Reykjavik.) In 1985, at an event in Washington, Albert Wohlstetter—the hawkish Cold War defense theorist, whose daughter Perle had dated in high school in Los Angeles, who had mentored Paul Wolfowitz at Chicago, and who had brought Perle and Wolfowitz together in Washington in the summer of 1969—introduced Perle to an Iraqi exile with a doctorate in theoretical mathematics from Chicago named Ahmad Chalabi.

  By the time of the PNAC letter in January 1998, Perle knew exactly how Saddam could be overthrown: Put Ahmad Chalabi at the head of an army of Iraqi insurgents and back him with American military power and cash.

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  IN 1996, some of the people in Perle’s circle had begun to think about what it would mean for Saddam Hussein to be removed from the Middle East scene. They concluded that it would be very good for Israel. Perle chaired a study group of eight pro-Likud Americans, including Douglas Feith, who had worked under Perle in the Reagan administration, and David Wurmser, who was the author of the paper produced under the group’s auspices (Perle lent his own name without ever reading it). Afterward, the group was pleased enough with its work to send the paper to the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” called for Israel to free itself from both socialist economic policies and the burdens of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Instead of retreating from occupied lands in exchange for dubious promises of peace, Wurmser wrote, Israel should take the fight to the Palestinians and their Arab backers and create a realignment of forces in the Middle East that would guarantee Israel’s security. Iraq played a central, if utterly fanciful, role in this scenario. The paper dreamed of restoring the Hashemite family of Jordan (deposed from the Iraqi throne in 1958, the year of the republican coup and Chalabi’s departure) to rule in Baghdad. The monarchy, in turn, despite being Sunni Muslim, would win over Iraq’s Shia because “the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendant of which—and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows—is King Hussein.” With Shiite support, the newly enthroned Hashemites “could use their influence over Najaf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.” Then the Palestinians, isolated and alone, would have to accept Israeli demands. Thus, a kingdom invented by T. E. Lawrence and other British officials after World War I to sustain colonial rule and defuse the problem of Arab nationalism resurfaced in 1996 as the quasi-mystical key that would unlock almost every stubborn problem of the contemporary Middle East—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the jihadi terrorism and resistance of Hezbollah, America’s reliance on oil from Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, and the secular Baathist tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

  Wurmser elaborated the theory in his 1999 book Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, published by the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing think tank where he was a scholar. The overthrow of Saddam would destabilize both Syria and Iran, isolate Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, and realign the entire Middle East so that—though this was never spelled out, as if the author feared making himself too clear—Israel would no longer need to negotiate with the Palestinians over the occupied territories. Tyranny’s Ally, with an introduction by Richard Perle and acknowledgments to Perle, Chalabi, Feith, Lewis, and several other intellectuals of the Iraq War, is a strange and revealing book. It reads as if a graduate student were feverishly trying to apply the half-digested concepts he’d learned in a class with Leo Strauss to subject matter he’d learned in a class with Bernard Lewis. There’s an undercurrent of deep distrust of the modern world: Modernity gave us totalitarianism, therefore modernity must be undone. Wurmser wanted to return Iraq to traditional values, especially to Shiite religious tradition (about which he knew almost nothing). “The root of the violence is a century-old radical attack on the Arab world’s traditional elite,” he wrote. “Proponents of the secular ideology assumed the prerogative to shape and reshape mankind according to their concept of perfection.” Dostoyevsky’s antirevolutionary novel Demons is invoked; the political ideas of Wurmser and a few other proponents of American intervention in the Middle East were closer to Dostoyevsky’s religious authoritarianism than to John Stuart Mill’s secular liberalism. They advocated democracy, but at bottom they were anti-Enlightenment.

  A few weeks before the start of the Iraq War, a State Department official described for me what he called the “everybody move over one theory”: Israel would annex the occupied territories, the Palestinians would get Jordan, and the Jordanian Hashemites would be restored to the throne of Iraq. By then, several of the paper’s signers, including Feith, Perle, and Wurmser, occupied key policy positions in the administration of George W. Bush, where they were shaping the imminent war to overthrow Saddam.

  Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests (as some critics of the war have charged, rather than addressing its merits head on)? Is neoconservative another word for Jewish (as some advocates of the war have complained, rather than addressing their critics head on)? For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover. But for others, such as Wolfowitz, Iraq stood for different things—an unfinished war, Arab tyranny, weapons proliferation, a strategic threat to oil, American weakness, Democratic fecklessness—and regime change there became the foreign-policy jackpot. A leading Israeli journalist, Ari Shavit, answered the conspiracy theory this way: Jews are drawn to ideas. The idea of realigning the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein was first proposed by a group of Jewish policy makers and intellectuals who were close to the Likud. And when the second President Bush looked around for a way to think about the uncharted era that began on September 11, 2001, there was one already available.

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  MOST AMERICAN LIBERALS opposed the Gulf War in 1991. The prospect of a ground assault by half a million troops (even if this was desert and not jungle) touched the extremely sensitive place where America’s last land war remained as a muscle memory. And this anxiety played no small part in the “no” votes on the war resolution cast by two young Democratic senators who were veterans of that last war, Bob Kerrey and John Kerry. Vietnam turned most Democrats born after World War II—including me—dovish. Still, the footage of grateful Kuwaitis waving at columns of American troops streaming through the liberated capital knocked something ajar in my worldview. American soldiers were the heroes. In northern Iraq, after the Kurdish uprising, militiamen known as peshmerga drove around with pictures of George H. W. Bush taped to their windshields. This was something new.

  The decade that followed the Gulf War scrambled everything and turned many of the old truths on their heads. The combination of the Cold War’s end, the outbreak of genocidal wars and ethnic conflicts in Europe and Africa, and a Democratic presidency made it possible for liberals to contemplate and even advocate the use of American force for the first time since the Kennedy years. There was more than a little one-eyed partisanship in this thinking, but there was also idealism, for it drew on a powerful idea that came out of one of the twentieth century’s greatest movements, the movement for human rights. The idea was that governments should not be allowed to abuse their own citizens on a massive scale; that sovereignty did not excuse rape, torture, murder, and genocide; that it was the world’s interest and obligation to end these crimes. This new kind of war became known as humanitarian intervention, and in this country its advocates acquired the name liberal interventionists or, in shorthand
, liberal hawks.

  Most liberals’ preferred institution for doing the intervening was the United Nations. By 1994, Bosnia and Rwanda, scenes of the decade’s two genocides, had shown that the UN wasn’t up to the task—its efforts in both places only seemed to perpetuate the slaughter and put innocent civilians at greater risk. Though Franklin Roosevelt envisioned the UN as an antifascist organization, it was founded as a body of sovereign nations; its ultimate function was to resolve disputes between them and preserve the status quo. With Libya taking its turn as chair of the Human Rights Commission, the UN was hardly the ideal instrument for stopping atrocities. Nor was it given the necessary push by the powers that sat on the Security Council, especially the United States. The UN and the Western powers passed responsibility for these tragedies back and forth, like a holding-company scheme. But for many citizens, including many American liberals, the unstopped bleeding in these distant places demanded a response, and if it wasn’t going to come from the UN or the European countries, it would have to come from the superpower.

  Without a Soviet Union or a Cold War, these interventions didn’t carry the odor of “vital strategic interest.” The very thing that disqualified Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Kosovo from meriting American force in the eyes of conservatives (“We don’t have a dog in that fight,” Secretary of State James Baker said of Bosnia) made force more thinkable to liberals. The rare Republican supporters of intervention (including Paul Wolfowitz), who saw national interest and the spread of human rights as inextricable, attacked liberals for their utopian dreams. “Airy humanitarianism” sneered Kagan. The fact that some liberals and conservatives supported the same military policies in the nineties didn’t mean that they had started from the same place; nor, a few years later, would they end up together.

  The Republican Party—again, partly out of strategic principle and partly out of naked partisanship—did everything it could to tie Clinton’s hands and prevent the American military from being used to fight distant, obscure wars or provide security in the inevitably messy aftermaths. Few terms were more reviled by Republicans than “nation building.” As Kagan, one of the rare dissenters, observed in 1995, “In a few short years, America had passed through a looking glass into an upside-down world where (some) liberal Democrats were calling for U.S. military action abroad while conservative Republicans warned of swamps, sand traps, neocolonialism, and ‘another Vietnam.’ The result was a timid and uncertain Democratic President whose few halfhearted gestures toward internationalist leadership were attacked and constrained by a Republican opposition in Congress.”

  For lifelong doves, the first sip of this drink called humanitarian intervention carried a special thrill. All the drama, the intense heat of argument, was generated in the decision whether or not to go to war. In this moment one’s moral credentials were on the line. It was a kind of existential choice, a statement of values, all the more potent for being politically unorthodox and sometimes even brave. None of this made the decisions any less serious or sincere, but the more mundane questions of what would happen later tended to dissolve in a mist of high purpose. And because liberal hawks responded to humanitarian crises, they were less likely to think strategically about the shape of the world in ten or twenty years; the long-range answers they offered, such as international criminal courts, UN resolutions, and regional intervention forces, seemed like noble wishes rather than practical answers. Over and over, they had to fall back on the solution with which they felt least comfortable—American power.

  Among the causes of the liberal hawks of the nineties, Iraq never made the list. Iraq had been a humanitarian crisis in 1988, when Saddam committed genocide against the Kurds at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, and again in 1991, when Saddam massacred the Shia and Kurds who had risen up at the end of the Gulf War. Apart from Kanan Makiya and a few other lonely voices, no one was calling for armed intervention to overthrow the Baathist regime back then. The idea hadn’t yet taken hold. Of course, one could argue, every day under Saddam’s rule in Iraq was a humanitarian crisis. Human Rights Watch and other organizations meticulously documented the Baath Party’s vast crimes. But without the eyes of the media, without reports of mass graves, and with the fear that war in Iraq would produce large-scale casualties, a dictator who had far more blood on his hands than Slobodan Milo&sbrave;ević managed to avoid the relentless opprobrium of the interventionists of the nineties. Perhaps the Arab world was somehow beyond the reach of human rights in a way that Bosnia and Kosovo were not. Perhaps the fact that the United States had strategic interests in the region (oil), and that the issue of Iraq involved unconventional weapons as well as mass murder, made the question of war more complicated for “airy humanitarians.” In any event, the Clinton years ended with no sense that the achievement in the Balkans should be followed up in Mesopotamia, or anywhere else. The liberal hawks had always been a minority, even among Democrats.

  The small, inconclusive wars of the nineties raised but failed to answer the essential questions of the post–Cold War world: What do human rights have to do with national security? What should the United States do about threats that the world insists on ignoring? Is it necessary for war to have the sanction of an international body? What are the limits of sovereignty? Can democracy be brought by force? Whose responsibility does a defeated country become after a war? Most of all: What role should America’s preeminent power play in shaping the answers? These questions hung in the air unanswered by the time the century turned. Soon the new administration in Washington would bring them all into focus, over Iraq.

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  BY 2000, the lame-duck President Clinton showed no sign of wanting to deal once and for all with a defiant Iraq. The Iraq Liberation Act was on the books but had never been in Clinton’s heart. Iraq became the neoconservatives’ leading cause because the Clinton policy of sanctions and occasional missile attacks seemed to be failing, but for a larger reason, too: They saw Iraq as the test case for their ideas about American power and world leadership. Iraq represented the worst failure of the nineties and the first opportunity of the new American century. In the middle of the 2000 presidential campaign, Kagan and Kristol published a warning shot in the form of an essay collection pointedly, and perhaps nostalgically, called Present Dangers. It was a book-length exposition of the themes of their earlier articles, and the contributors included many of the leading figures in what was becoming a critical mass of hawkish foreign-policy opinion. Richard Perle’s essay dripped scorn, claiming that Clinton’s December 1998 bombing of Iraqi installations, widely ridiculed as a “wag the dog” distraction in the middle of impeachment hearings, “had no lasting effect” (an assertion that was refuted after the invasion by the Iraq Survey Group, which found that the missile strikes had helped to finish off what was left of Saddam’s chemical weapons facilities). Without mentioning his friend Ahmad Chalabi by name, Perle proposed the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Chalabi, as the crowbar with which America could pry Iraq free from Saddam’s grip. Finally, Perle broke the last taboo and broached the possibility of a U.S. military role: “As a last resort … we should build up our own ground forces in the region so that we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq.”

  Paul Wolfowitz’s essay was far more judicious, an on-the-other-hand attempt to apply principles learned during the Cold War to the new world, with its many new dangers. Though this ex-Democrat was as contemptuous of the Democrats as the book’s other essayists, Wolfowitz seemed in no mood to assert America’s benevolent hegemony across the globe. He even glanced back worriedly at the trauma that had made so many liberals into pacifists. “We cannot ignore the uncomfortable fact that economic and social circumstances may better prepare some countries for democracy than others,” wrote Wolfowitz, who had served a stint as a widely admired ambassador to Indonesia (most of the other neoconservatives had spent their entire careers in Washington). “Oddly, we seem to have forgotten what Vietnam sh
ould have taught us about the limitations of the military as an instrument of ‘nation-building.’ Promoting democracy requires attention to specific circumstances and to the limitations of U.S. leverage. Both because of what the United States is, and because of what is possible, we cannot engage either in promoting democracy or in nation-building as an exercise of will. We must proceed by interaction and indirection, not imposition. In this respect, post–World War II experiences with Germany and Japan offer misleading guides to what is possible now, even in a period of American primacy.”