The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  One of Bush’s advisers once explained to the journalist Ron Suskind the worldview of the White House. Whereas the nation-building experts and the war critics and Ron Suskind lived “in what we call the reality-based community” where people “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality,” unfortunately “that’s not the way the world really works anymore.” The way the world now works amounted to a repudiation of reason, skeptical intelligence, the whole slate of liberal Enlightenment values. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors,” the aide concluded, “and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

  This was the Bush presidency without the inspirational rhetoric, more Leninist than Christian in tone, determined not just to remake the world after its own unexplained will but to sweep away all opponents in the process. Philosophically as well as practically, there was a serious flaw in the project of such an administration becoming the bearer of democratic values to the world. Democracy was inherently self-critical. But because the president always prayed to be “as good a messenger of His will as possible,” his Iraq policy would ultimately succeed. By believing so, by appearing to believe so, by forcing such discipline on his administration that no appearance to the contrary ever escaped the seal, he would create the reality that would follow. Faith, hubris, or both, it was a strategy for victory.

  I asked Richard Perle whether the top Bush officials ever suffered doubts about Iraq. “We all have doubts all the time,” Perle said. “We don’t express them, certainly not in a public debate. That would be fatal.” Expressing doubts in public would give opponents exactly what they were waiting for. In public, Perle himself essentially said, “I told you so.” To a French documentary filmmaker he said, “Most people thought there would be tens of thousands of people killed, and it would be a long and very bloody war. I thought it would be over in three weeks, with very few people killed. Now, who was right?” That was early on. As the war became longer and bloodier, Perle was still right, but in a different way: If only five thousand INC members had gone in with the Americans as he had wanted, if only Ahmad Chalabi had been installed at the head of an interim government at the start, all these problems could have been avoided. Michael Rubin, one of Perle’s young protégés, left the Office of Special Plans and then the CPA to start a second career as a writer, and his single subject was the stupidity of officials in the White House, the State Department, and the CIA in botching postwar Iraq by not listening to Michael Rubin and his neoconservative allies in the Pentagon—the agency that ran the occupation. Every key postwar decision was made by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, or Rumsfeld’s appointee Bremer. None of them publicly uttered a single doubt, a syllable of self-scrutiny.

  Leslie Gelb worked in the Pentagon during the last months of the Johnson presidency, and he directed the writing of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by Robert McNamara before leaving office. I expressed skepticism to Gelb that Donald Rumsfeld had commissioned anyone at the Pentagon to write a secret history of the Iraq War. “You can bet your bippy,” Gelb said with a laugh. “Only liberals look back and say they were wrong.” Neoconservatives, by contrast, “say they were stabbed in the back. It’s not accidental that President Bush during the campaign couldn’t answer the question whether he ever made a mistake. I’ve never seen those folks say they were wrong. Vietnam was a liberals’ war. This is not. They’re not dumb—they’re very smart. And they’re reckless.” Comparing Bush to his own boss, Gelb went on, “Johnson was a tragic figure. He was driven by the imperative not to lose the war. He knew he couldn’t win. Bush is Johnson squared, because he thinks he can win. Bush is the one true believer. We’re talking about a guy essentially cut off from all information except the official line.”

  The theology of confidence served the president well in domestic politics. Steadfastness in wartime is an essential quality, and after the 2004 election no one could reasonably doubt his ability as a politician. For him, the result validated everything he had done and proved all his critics wrong. “We had an accountability moment,” the president said, “and that’s called the 2004 election.” But in Iraq, which had a reality of its own, the approach didn’t work as well.

  When Bush spoke, as he did in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in September 2004 and again in his inaugural address in January 2005, about the power of freedom to change the world, he was sounding deep notes in the American psyche. His Democratic opponent came nowhere close to making such music. But when Iraq looked nothing like the president’s soaring vision—when Iraq was visibly deteriorating, and no one in authority would admit it—the speeches produced either illusion or cynicism in the public. What would determine success or failure in the war was what happened in Iraq and how Iraqis perceived it. The president’s relentless assertion that the war was succeeding forced the entire government to fall in line or risk the White House’s wrath. So agencies sometimes issued reconstruction reports that prettified the truth, and officials here breathed easier for a while; but the total megawattage in Iraq hadn’t changed. Covering up failures only widened the gap in perception between Washington and Baghdad—which, in turn, made Washington less capable of grasping and responding to Iraqi reality. Deception turned into self-deception, until it was hard to know where one ended and the other began. Eventually, the failures announced themselves anyway—in a series of suicide bombings, a slow attrition of Iraqi confidence, a sudden insurrection. War, unlike budget forecasts and presidential campaigns, is merciless with untruth. In refusing to look honestly at Iraq, Bush made defeat there more likely.

  He wasn’t pandering to the public, as most politicians would have. Unlike Clinton, he always operated from strength, not weakness. (Whether the Churchillian display of determination was in fact an extended case of overcompensation for crippling insecurity, one couldn’t say without knowing him intimately.) No one ever seemed to believe the administration line more fervently than the president. But because the line didn’t depend on facts, and because the distinction between policy and politics was erased, what Bush wanted Americans to believe often had damaging reverberations in Iraq. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Tony Blair’s envoy in Baghdad, watched governments in Washington and London try to bend Iraq to their own political needs and concluded that the CPA was hampered by its creators. “You have to make decisions on what you do judged against the criteria within and about Iraq, not within and about any other political context,” Greenstock told me in his office at the palace just across from Bremer’s. “If you want the American and British publics to be happy about the results in Iraq, you don’t stare at them and say, ‘What do they want next, or how should we judge this event?’ You look at Iraq, and you produce the substance that will make them happy. You don’t produce the presentation that might make them happy tomorrow. To some extent, both the U.S. and the U.K. underplayed the need to judge things by what was happening on the ground.”

  The advisers around the president understood his strengths and what he needed to know in order to make decisions. On the day before the election, I discussed the White House operation with a senior administration official, who said that the airtight bubble encasing Bush only exaggerated a recent tendency of American presidents. “They’re enshrouded by yes-men and yes-women who tell them what they want to hear. George Tenet is at the top of the list. People who can smell the political angle and furnish the information that will give the president what the political angle is. No one ever walks into the Oval Office and tells them they’ve got no clothes on—and persists. You’ve got to persist. You can’t just do it once.” He went on, “I think it’s dangerous that we have an environment where our principal leader cannot be well informed. It’s part and parcel of the office.” I
n this administration more than any other, the official said, the environment “is scary, because of the president and the atmosphere and the people there.”

  When a transport helicopter was shot down near Falluja in November 2003, killing fifteen soldiers who were flying out on leave, the public waited for the president to make a statement about the single worst combat incident of the war. But Bush said nothing for two days, until, pressed by reporters while he was touring wildfire damage in southern California, he put his hand over his heart and said, “I’m saddened any time someone dies. I’m saddened. Because I know a family hurts. And there’s a deep pain inside somebody’s heart. But I do want to remind the loved ones that their sons and daughters—or the sons, in this case—died for a cause greater than themselves, and a noble cause, which is the security of the United States.” The president seemed not to know that two of the soldiers on the helicopter had been women. Another president—Reagan or Clinton—would not have missed such a detail. It wasn’t indifference on Bush’s part. It was a deliberate strategy of not being told too much, not getting bogged down in the day-to-day problems of the war, not waiting up past midnight like Lyndon Johnson in the Situation Room, the lines visibly deepening in his face, for the casualty figures to come in. Not knowing was part of the strategy for victory. It kept the news from overwhelming the message that the administration put out for each day’s cycle, but it also kept the president himself from being distracted and discouraged. And, politically, it worked. Bush never seemed to be a president under siege. It went wrong only when he missed a detail like the postwar plan.

  There was, for example, the question of what to do about the coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base. Ever since the invasion of Panama in 1989, when a split screen showed the first President Bush giving a speech alongside the solemn spectacle of dead soldiers coming home, a picture that the White House didn’t want, presidents recognized the unsettling power of the image and tried to avoid it. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon made the policy official: There would be no photographs or film at Dover. Again, the move achieved a political success in keeping the steady death toll abstract for those Americans who were not personally affected. It played its part in making Iraq a remote war.

  I asked Chris Frosheiser what he thought about the policy. He said, “We need to see the coffins, the flag-draped coffins. The hawks need to see it. They need to know there’s a price to pay, there’s a big price to pay. If they don’t have skin in the game, they need to see it. And the doves need to see the dignity of the sacrifice. They don’t always see that.” He wanted to collect Kurt’s posthumous medals, his folded funeral flag, his autopsy report, and a photo of the head wound, and take them on the road in fifteen-minute presentations around the country. He would tell the gung-ho, “Suit up and show up.” He would tell the skeptical about the idea of soldier’s duty. Or else he wouldn’t say anything at all. He simply wanted people to see.

  * * *

  THE IDEA of diminishing the threat to America from ideologies originating in the Middle East by moving the politics of the region toward democracy, beginning in Iraq, had occurred to the Bush administration before the weapons turned out not to exist. Some officials had been thinking and writing about it for years, and the president had sketched it out in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute a month before the invasion. But this was not the casus belli that the American people signed on for, it was not the drumbeat of official statements before the war. So the way the administration shifted the argument later on without ever admitting it had every appearance of a bait and switch.

  Still, despite the cynicism of its use, the idea was a serious one, and it deserved to be taken seriously by the political opposition at home and the allies around the world. Instead, the war’s critics, including leaders of the Democratic Party, steadily refused to engage the debate. They turned the subject back to the missing weapons, or they scoffed at the administration’s sincerity, or they muttered about the dangers of utopianism, or they said nothing. A few Democrats, like Biden, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and the editors of The New Republic, took up the idea without relenting in their criticism of the administration’s conduct in Iraq. This was a difficult mental balancing act, but it was also important, because what Iraqis and democracy needed more than anything in this country was a thoughtful opposition that could hold the Bush administration to its own promises—not in a game of gotcha, but in a real effort to make Iraq a success. Without such an opposition, the negligent and reckless fathers of administration policy would be free to starve their newborn or force-feed it until it choked to death. And, in part because such an opposition never materialized, that’s what they continued to do.

  The administration had such a talent for polarization that the effects eventually turned inward. Though the public seal remained airtight for a full year after the invasion, internally the bitterness engendered by the ideological battles started to erode the effort in Iraq almost from the start. Colin Powell, the loser of almost every major policy fight, told a morning staff meeting, “We have one priority. That priority is Iraq. What Jerry Bremer asks for, Jerry Bremer gets, and he gets it today. Any questions?” And yet during the life of the CPA, the State Department didn’t send all its best people to Iraq, even after the Pentagon’s influence waned and Bremer began to use his back channel to Powell more and more. A department official said of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, the archenemy of the neoconservatives, “We didn’t do our best job to get things uncocked or to help. I watched NEA, for example, essentially say, ‘Okay, you don’t want us—fuck you.’ And then from there on out it was, ‘Let’s see what impediments we can put in their way. Let’s see how long we can be in delivering this particular commodity or individual or amount of expertise. Let’s see how long we can stiff ’em.’”

  It was easy to say that the White House, with its strategy of political annihilation, deserved no quarter from its opponents, least of all the Democrats. But the standoff brought out the destructive instincts of each party, and Iraq got the worst of it. Abdication also left the Democratic Party in a bad position, both morally and politically. The party’s fortunes during the election year came to depend on Iraq turning into a disaster. When a journalist pointed this out to the antiwar candidate Howard Dean, who was then the front-runner for the nomination, Dean said, “I’m not betting on it, and I’m hoping against it, but there’s no indication that I should be expecting anything else.” An informed assessment leading to the conclusion that the American presence could only make matters worse, with no chance of a turnaround, deserved a hearing. But what the Democrats offered was something else: a detached and complacent negativism. The election year proved to be the year in which Iraq did turn into a disaster, and if the Democrats failed to benefit, it was partly because they had nothing to offer instead, and the public chose not to elect a party whose stance on the most important foreign-policy issue in a generation was arms folded across the chest. Chris Frosheiser ended up voting for Kerry by a hair, more out of party loyalty than anything else, but between Bush’s attempts at Lincolnian rhetoric and Kerry’s unconvincing multipoint plans, a slender majority of American voters went for jury-rigged hope. Yet the war continued to grow less and less popular.

  The cynicism on both sides was bound to reach the troops and inform their political consciousness, which was already being shaped by what they heard and saw and did in Iraq. Especially among many enlisted men and women, the mission became harder over time to understand and justify. When I was in Mahmudiya, I looked up four of Kurt Frosheiser’s platoon buddies, including Matt Plumley, who had been next to him in the Humvee the night of his death. We sat down together in a stifling trailer on the base. They were all privates, all but one in their early twenties, and they all expressed a tender and fatalistic affection for the young man they called Fro.

  “That incident woke me up,” said Marcus Murphy, a blond, soft-spoken Indianan. “These people are trying to kill us.”

  “It’s amazing,�
�� Plumley said. “We’re here trying to help.”

  Latrael Brigham, a black soldier from Texas, took Kurt’s death as a failure of leadership. “I was pissed off, because we’re riding around here with messed-up equipment. If you send men to war, you have to prepare them and equip them so they can fight. And have a vision of the aftermath of the war, have a plan about how you’re going to finish it. And not just jump into it. And not put the whole burden on us Americans.”

  “Dealing with IEDs,” said Patrick Weydemuller, a big, quiet Californian who was a few years older than the others. “That’s what we’re dealing with. We’re not dealing with WMDs. We’re protecting ourselves from insurgents.”

  “We got ourselves into something,” Brigham said. “I wish I could have some real answers to why we’re here, but I don’t think I’ll ever have them. Not anytime soon.”

  Plumley, Kurt’s best friend in the unit, had a shy manner and a sweet Southern twang. He was less ready than Brigham to write the whole thing off. “If everyone here hated us, there’d be IEDs every five inches.” He shook his head. “This urban guerrilla warfare—I joined the military, so I’m being sort of hypocritical, but I liked the isolationism that we had at one time.” But when he compared his situation to that of Vietnam veterans, he said, “They had it a lot worse. Their morale was even worse than ours. Right next to Vietnam, this is the worst morale there’s been.”