The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  This state of affairs on the home front was, in one way, the natural outgrowth of a political atmosphere that had become increasingly poisonous for a decade. The culture wars produced Clinton hatred, which led to impeachment, followed by the contested election of 2000, followed by Bush hatred, which was just as intense and crazy making as its predecessor. Iraq provided another level on the downward spiral. Whereas the street fights of the late 1960s were the consequence of Vietnam, the word fights of the early 2000s were not the consequence of Iraq—if anything, the other way around.

  It was the first bloggers’ war, and the characteristic features of the form—instant response, ad hominem attack, remoteness from life, the echo chamber of friends and enemies—defined the quality of the debate about Iraq far better than the reasoned analyses and proposals that quickly disappeared from view in responsible newspapers and policy journals. One of the leading bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, who would later have honorable second thoughts about the Bush administration and Iraq, responded to the news of Saddam’s capture in December 2003 by writing, “It was a day of joy. Nothing remains to be said right now. Joy.” He had just handed out eleven mock awards to leftists who expressed insufficient happiness or open unhappiness at the news. In response to an Iraqi blogger’s declaration of heartfelt thanks to the coalition forces, Sullivan, at his computer in Washington, wrote, “You’re welcome … The men and women in our armed forces did the hardest work. They deserve our immeasurable thanks. But we all played our part.” Sullivan’s joy was vindictive and narcissistic glee, and he rubbed his opponents’ faces in it. From the prewar period through the invasion into the occupation and insurgency, an ascendant, triumphalist right and a weakened, querulous left took more interest and pleasure in the other’s defeats than in the condition of Iraq or Iraqis. In this country, Iraq was almost always about winning the argument.

  This was never clearer than when I traveled from one place to the other. I would come back from Iraq with its swarm of contradictions as vivid in my mind as every individual face or voice: It was a liberation, it was an occupation; the Iraqis were hopeful, the Iraqis were furious; there was a chance for democracy, there was a reign of terror; the CPA was working hard, the CPA was getting nowhere; American soldiers were kindhearted, American soldiers were reckless. Then I would sit down to dinner with a group of progressive-minded people who all wanted to know what it was like over there, and before I could get halfway through one encounter with one Iraqi, the invective came at me with astonishing force, wind-aided by a change of subject to the sins of the Bush administration. The same was true, on the other side of the looking glass, in the columns and talk shows of right-wing commentators: Every shred of good news—the arrest of a top Baathist, the reopening of a museum—became definitive evidence that it was working. Everyone wanted to know whether or not it was working, and the question usually came loaded, and the answer had better be quick and simple. There were not many people in America who could stand the cognitive dissonance with which Iraqis live every day.

  Actually going to Iraq didn’t have to intrude on this mental self-sufficiency. Christopher Hitchens, who had just published a book titled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, flew in with the entourage of Paul Wolfowitz in the summer of 2003, spent a few days in the deputy secretary’s wake, and came back to tell Fox News that the revolution from above was succeeding splendidly, with the Americans busy rebuilding the place, gathering intelligence, rolling up Baathists, and making friends with the people—none of which was appearing in press coverage. “I felt a sense of annoyance that I had to go there myself to find any of that out,” Hitchens confessed to the Fox interviewer. The following March, with the long short war showing signs of turning into a short long war, Fred Barnes, an editor of the strenuously prowar Weekly Standard, parachuted into the Green Zone and discovered that the only thing wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom was Iraqis. “They need an attitude adjustment,” Barnes wrote. “Americans I talked to in 10 days here agree Iraqis are difficult to deal with. They’re sullen and suspicious and conspiracy-minded.” This wasn’t the prewar judgment of hawks like Barnes, but something had to explain all the bumps in the road, which would lead to a successful democracy in Iraq only after “an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another.” Naomi Klein, a columnist for the bitterly antiwar Nation, visited Baghdad at exactly the same time as Barnes and found that the insurgency was mushrooming because so many Iraqis shared her own antiglobalization views. In Iraq it was always possible to prove that you’d been right all along.

  Because the Iraq War began in ideas, it always suffered from abstraction. But long after those ideas took actual shape in Kevlar and C-4 and shrapnel, the war’s most conspicuous proponents and detractors continued to see it and speak of it in the French historian Marc Bloch’s “large abstract terms.” The key terms in Iraq were “imperialism,” “democracy,” “unilateralism,” “internationalization,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “preemption,” “terrorism,” “totalitarianism,” “neoconservatism,” “appeasement.” One month after he survived the bombing in Baghdad, I met Ghassan Salamé, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello’s political adviser, in the lobby of UN headquarters in New York. Looking a little wan, Salamé said, “Iraq needs to be liberated—liberated from big plans. Every time people mentioned it in the last few years, it was to connect it to big ideas: the war against WMDs, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, more recently the war against terrorism and a model of democracy. That’s why all these mistakes are made. They’re made because Iraq is always in someone’s mind the first step to something else.”

  With their eyes turned to such lofty matters, few prowar ideologues allowed the bad news from Iraq to break their stride. Either they refused to credit it, blaming the media and the defeatists for hiding the truth, or they continued to take such a long view of history that a hundred Iraqis or a dozen Americans blown up in a suicide bombing hardly factored. But this was just as true on the antiwar side of the ledger. Experience taught me that the individual stories of Iraqis struggling against danger and the odds to create a better life for themselves and their country were impatiently flicked aside as soon as I tried to tell them. The retort was swift and sure: “This war is illegal, it’s immoral. Nothing good can come of a lie.” In spite of the enormous stakes and the terrible alternatives, most antiwar pundits and politicians showed no interest in success. When Iraqis risked their lives to vote, Arianna Huffington dismissed the elections as a “Kodak moment.” It was Bush’s war, and if it failed, it would be Bush’s failure.

  America in the early twenty-first century seemed politically too partisan, divided, and small to manage something as vast and difficult as Iraq. Condoleezza Rice and other leading officials were fond of comparing Iraq with postwar Germany. But there was a great gulf between the tremendous thought and effort of the best minds that had gone into defeating fascism and rebuilding Germany and Japan, and the peevish, self-serving attention paid to Iraq. One produced the Army’s four-hundred-page manual on the occupation of Germany; the other produced talking points.

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  WHAT MADE THIS POLITICAL CULTURE particularly unfortunate for Iraqis was that the Bush administration, instead of forging the war into a truly national cause, conducted it from the beginning like the South Carolina primary.

  In the aftermath of September 11, President Bush was granted what few presidents ever get: national unity and the goodwill of both parties. In the days that followed the terror attacks, we saw the early stages of something like a popular self-mobilization. The long lines of blood donors, the volunteers converging from around the country on Manhattan, the fumbling public efforts at understanding Islam: The response took on very personal tones. People spoke as if they wanted to change their lives. An unemployed young video producer waiting to give blood in Brooklyn said to me, “I volunteered so I could be part of something. All over the world people do something for an ideal. I’ve
been at no point in my life when I could say something I’ve done has affected mankind.” The feverish outbreak of public-spiritedness couldn’t have lasted, but its intensity suggested that the country had snapped out of a collective daydream. A generation legendary for its self-centeredness seemed to grasp that here was a historic chance to aim for something greater.

  It was much remarked at the time that President Bush did nothing to tap this palpable desire among ordinary people to join a larger effort. Americans were told to go shopping and watch out for suspicious activity. It was Pearl Harbor, and it was a bad day on the stock exchange; nothing would ever be the same, and everything was just the same. Joseph Biden wondered, “How urgent can this be if I tell you this is a great crisis and, at the time we’re marching to war, I give the single largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America?” The tax cuts didn’t just leave the country fiscally unsound during wartime; their inequity was bad for morale. But the president’s failure to call for shared, equal sacrifice wasn’t accidental. It followed directly from the governing spirit of the modern conservative movement that his presidency brought to full power. After years of a sustained assault on the idea of collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which Bush could have stood up and asked what Americans could do for their country. We weren’t urged to study Arabic, to join the foreign service or international aid groups, to develop alternative sources of energy, to form a national civil reserve for emergencies—or even to pay off the cost of the war in our own time. Its burdens would be borne by the next generation of Americans, and by a few hundred thousand volunteer soldiers in this one.

  Perhaps it was a shrewd political read on Bush’s part—a recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11, would inevitably slouch back to their sofas. It seemed fair to ask, though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours was likely to make it over the long, hard slog of wartime; how convincingly we could export democratic values when our own version showed so many signs of atrophy; how much solidarity we could expect to muster for Afghans and Iraqis when we were asked to feel so little for one another.

  So the months after September 11 were a lost opportunity—to harness the surge of civic energy and to frame the new war against Islamist radicalism as a national struggle. It should have been the job not just of the experts in the intelligence agencies and Special Forces but also of ordinary American citizens to wage it. And it should have been waged on many fronts, with many tools—not just military, but also intellectual, diplomatic, economic, political, cultural. This had been the vision of the architects of the early Cold War, whom Chris Frosheiser read about in a college history course and whom he came to admire even more after September 11. But it wasn’t the president’s vision. Bush’s rhetoric soared and inspired, but his actions showed that he had a narrow strategy for fighting the war, which amounted to finding and killing terrorists and their supporters. Other agendas, such as his tax cuts and energy policy and the bitter fights they stirred, disrupted the clarity and unity of September 11. Bush continued to govern from his ideological base. His message to the public was essentially, “Trust me,” and the public slipped into a fearful passivity.

  Whatever national cohesion remained by mid-2002 came undone in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. The White House forced a congressional vote on a war resolution one month before the 2002 midterm elections, in an atmosphere of partisan invective. While Republicans on the floor of the House and Senate were accusing their Democratic colleagues of Chamberlain-like appeasement of Saddam, others on the campaign trail were charging their opponents with dereliction of duty in defending the country because of Democratic objections to a provision in the Homeland Security Bill designed to weaken civil service unions. (The White House, having rejected the notion of a Homeland Security Department at the outset, later wrote language into the bill that forced Democrats to choose between their own idea and their labor base.) Joseph Biden, working with his colleague Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drafted a war resolution that placed a few constraints on the administration’s ability to act, making it slightly less likely that America would go to war without international participation, but that stood a better chance of gaining bipartisan support. The White House maneuvered to block the Biden-Lugar bill and got its own passed on a more partisan vote. The strategy of Bush’s political adviser, Karl Rove, paid off in November, when the Republicans regained the Senate and added to their majority in the House. But the administration left behind an embittered Democratic minority and an increasingly divided electorate, just as it was preparing to take the country into a major land war.

  The president was pursuing two courses at once: to reshape American foreign policy, and to consolidate his party’s hold on power. Perhaps it was old-fashioned to point out that these courses might eventually collide, at some risk to national interests. It wasn’t impossible yet, in the fall of 2002, to imagine a policy that harnessed both parties and America’s democratic allies in defeating tyranny in Iraq. Such a policy would have required the administration to operate with more flexibility and openness than it wanted to. The evidence on unconventional weapons would have had to be laid out without exaggeration or deception. Once the UN inspectors were back in Iraq, they would have had to be allowed to carry out their work rather than be undermined by a campaign of vilification. Testimony to Congress would have had to be candid, not slippery. Administration officials who offered dissenting views or pessimistic forecasts would have had to be heard rather than silenced or fired. Experts in nation building would have had to be welcomed, not shut out, even if they had things to say that the White House didn’t want to hear. American citizens would have had to be treated like grown-ups, and not, as Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card once suggested, ten-year-olds.

  After the invasion, European allies would have had to be coaxed into joining an effort that desperately needed their help. French, German, and Canadian companies would have had to be invited to bid on contracts, not barred by an order signed by Paul Wolfowitz (who once wrote that American leadership required “demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished and that those who refuse to support you will live to regret having done so”). American contractors close to the Pentagon would have had to be subjected to extraordinary scrutiny—not just to make sure that billions of dollars weren’t wasted in Iraq, but to avoid even the appearance of corruption. Congress would have had to be kept steadily and candidly informed of the situation on the ground. Tony Blair would have had to be given something in exchange for his steadfast support, such as a serious effort at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian problem. The UN would have had to be brought into Iraq as an equal partner, not a tool of American convenience. The top American civilian in Iraq might even have had to be a Democrat, or a moderate Republican such as the retired general Anthony Zinni, whom an administration official privately described as the best-qualified person for the job held by Paul Bremer. (“You’ve got to rise above politics,” the official said. “You’ve got to pick the best team. You’ve got to be like Franklin Roosevelt.”) Political appointees would have had to be screened out of the occupation authority as much as possible in favor of competent, nonpartisan experts with experience overseas. The occupation authority would have had to focus on Iraqi society rather than serving as an arm of the White House. Its media office’s public statements would have had to pass the laugh test every single day.

  And when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the administration would have had to admit it to the world. President Bush would have had to give a nationally televised speech and, quoting his chief weapons inspector, David Kay, would have had to say, “We were almost all wrong.” The president would have had to scratch evasive formulations like “weapons of mass destruction–related program activities” from his State of the Union address. Officials and generals who were responsible for scandal and failu
re would have had to be given the sack, not a pat on the back or the Medal of Freedom. When reporters asked the president to name one mistake he had made in Iraq, he would have had to name five, while assuring the country that they were being corrected because he had been able to identify them. He would have had to summon all his rhetorical skill to explain to the country why, in spite of the failure to find weapons, ending tyranny in Iraq and helping it to become a democracy as the start of change in the Middle East was morally the right thing to do, important for American security, and worthy of a generational effort. In fact, he would have had to explain this before the war, when the inspectors were turning up no sign of weapons, thus allowing the country to have a real debate about the real reason for the war, so that when the war came, it would not come amid rampant suspicions and surprises, and America would not be alone in Iraq.

  Character is fate. What prevented any of this from happening was, above all, the character of the president. Bush’s war, like his administration, like his political campaigns, was run with his own absence of curiosity and self-criticism, his projection of absolute confidence, the fierce loyalty he bestowed and demanded. He always conveyed the impression that Iraq and the war on terror were personal tests. Every time a suicide bomber detonated himself, he was trying to shake George W. Bush’s will. If Bush remained steadfast, how could America fail? He liked to call himself a wartime president, and he kept a bust of his hero Winston Churchill in the Oval Office. But Churchill led a government of national unity and offered his countrymen nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Bush relentlessly pursued the partisan Republican agenda while fighting the war, and what he offered was optimistic forecasts, permanent tax cuts, and his own stirring resolve.