As Americans ponder what went wrong in Iraq, there may be no more valuable book than George Packer's "The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq."Packer, a writer for the New Yorker, initially supported the war, albeit tepidly. He did not believe that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, but saw the war as a way to get rid of the tyrant and build democracy. (For what it's worth, I felt exactly the opposite: I reluctantly bought into the Bush administration line that Saddam had WMDs and was therefore a threat. But I had anticipated that ousting him and then stabilizing the country, let alone installing a democratic government, would be a bridge too far.)
"Assassin's Gate" insightfully describes how the Bush administration turned a military victory into the bloody and agonizingly unending occupation that I had forseen. Packer, who spent much of the last three years in Iraq, is unflinchingly balanced, which make his insights into the profound disconnect between the power elite in Washington and what was going on the ground in Iraq -- which is at the very heart of what went wrong -- so valuable.
(The Assassin's Gate, shown above, was so named by U.S. troops following a series of car bombings than killed over 30 Iraqi civilians. It is the entrance to the U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad.)
Because I believe "Assassin's Gate" to be so important, I've culled some excerpts that provide a some sense of the foundations for and run-up to the war and its chaotic aftermath:
Why did the United States invade Iraq? It still isn't possible to be sure -- and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War. Richad Haass [former Secretary of State Colin Powel's chief adviser] said that he will go to his grave not knowing the answer. It was something that some people wanted to do. Before the invasion, Americans argued not just about whether a war should happen, but for what reasons it should happen -- what the real motives of the Bush administration were and should be. Since the invasion, we have continued to argue, and we will go on arguing for years to come. Iraq is the Rashomon of wars.
* * * *
In its long struggle for the soul of the Republican Party and American foreign policy, neoconservatism had finally triumphed. The first chance to test the creed was coming up fast, in Iraq.
The worm in the apple, the seed of future trouble, is easier to see in retrospect. . . . Once they got back into power, [the neoconservatives] told themselves they would do everything differently. Cheney, the hardest of the hardliners, expressed contemtuous disapproval of every intervention of the decade. Rumsfeld hadn't formed a new idea since opposing arms control as Gerald Ford's secretary of defense. Powell and Rice were deep skeptics of open-ended military commitments on behalf of "soft" ideals. Bush himself came into office with no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that had his predecessor had entangled Americans in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests. Wolfowitz alone among them supported the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, but his worldview left even him unprepared to deal with or even to acknowledge a stateless organization with an ideology of global jihad. When September 11 forced the administration to grapple with something radically news, the president's foreign-policy advisers reached for what they had always known. The answer, as ever, was military power and the will to use it.
* * * *
But what about the massive task of planning for postwar Iraq? The State Department's Future of Iraq Project was toiling away, and an interagency working group was meeting regularly under the auspices of the National Security Council; but there was still no postwar policy. How long would the United States stay in Iraq? Would the country be under American military occupation or international supervision? When would a new Iraqi government be set up. and how, and who would run it? The press speculated, but no one really knew, because the Bush administration couldn't make up its mind. Rice and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser and her deputy, allowed the question to remain open while diplomacy at the UN broke down, troops poured into the Middle East, and the momentum toward war built irreversibly.
* * * *
The fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square on April 9 [2003] was received by many Americans as the sudden and dramatic end of a lightning war. . . .There was celebration in Washington, too -- an outburst of triumphalism and gloating that was as much partisan as patriotic and looked not at all like the simple joyful kiss of a sailor and a nurse in Times Square on VJ Day.
* * * *
From the Pentagon, Rumsfeld regarded the rising chaos in Baghdad with equanimity. "Stuff happens," the official in charge of postwar Iraq said . . . Rumsfeld's words, which soon became notorious, implied a whole political philosophy. . . In his view and that of others in the administration, but above all the president, freedom was the absence of constraint. Freedom existed in divinely endowed human nature, not in man-made institutions and laws. Remove a thirty-five-year-old tyranny and democracy will grow in its place. . . . What had been left out of the planning were the Iraqis themselves.
* * * *
[By July 2003] Iraq was restless and convulsive, as if liberation had introduced a virus into the organism and a fever was burning through the country. Day and night the background noise was gunfire, and it grew especially intense after the ten o'clock curfew, when no one who cared about his safety went outside. Now and then walls shook with a grenade or mortar round. The only force of order was the American military, but convoys of Humvees rattled through the city streets at speeds that had more to do with force protection than policing. Guerrilla attacks on soliders were already occuring at a rate of twenty per day in Baghdad alone.
* * * *
Americans were constantly typing away at computers or hurrying to and fro across marble floors or taking quick breaks under the great granite columns [of the Coalition Provisional Authority building], working late into the night seven days a week with a kind of fresh optimistic energy that could not have been in sharper contrast to the exhausted country outside the security perimeter into which they'd been air-dropped. Most of them seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours.
. . . A senior administration official said, "We sent an inexperienced, youthful, full-of-zest, full-of-courage team to do what seasoned professionals would have found extremely challenging, if not impossible. Instead we sent a third team, or a fourth team, or a fifth team."
* * * *
The soldiers were out on the streets, so they began to grasp the difficulty of the occupation much earlier than the CPA in the palace. They were on the front line of complaints: It was the lieutenant on foot patrol, not the senior adviser to the Minister of Electricity, who was asked by the woman standing outside her house why the electricity kept going off and who had to explain that he couldn't do anything about it. The soldiers were also less invested in their ideological preconceptions, and though they were woefully ignorant of the country and the region, the nature of their work forced them to be pragmatists.
* * * *
The number of American soldiers in Iraq, which hovered around 135,000, sometimes spiking or dropping by ten or twenty thousand in response to events, reflected nothing other than Rumsfeld's fixed idea of military transformation. If more troops had to be found and sent, the direction in which he wanted to take the twenty-first century military would be called into serious question. It's hard to imagine that Rumsfeld suffered even private doubts about this: He had a vision, and the messy aftermath of the Iraq War wasn't going to turn him aside.
* * * *
The top officials in the administration, and the top brass at the Pentagon, and the top officials in Iraq all held onto their positions and failed the men and women they had sent to carry out their policy. They failed in the most basic obligation to give those men and women what they needed. The slow, mismanaged arrival of armored vehicles and bulletproof plates for flak vests was only the most conspicuous demonstration of how the Iraq War, like every war -- just or unjust, won or lost -- became a conspiracy of the old and powerful against the young and dutiful.
* * * *
The guerrilla war that followed in invasion of Iraq caught the U.S. military by surprise. It shouldn't have. The CIA issued several secret prewar intelligence reports warning of the possibility of an insurgency. . . . The American war planners assumed the kind of resistance they could most easily defeat. They didn't want to fight a guerrilla war -- after Vietnam it had ceased to be an option. In planning for the wrong adversary, they failed to follow the ancient military dictum to "know your enemy." It was another failure of imagination.
The Iraqi insurgents thus had time to prepare, they had the advantage of surprise, and they adapted quickly as the battlefield changed.
* * * *
Kalev Sepp [was] a retired Army lieutenant colonel who taught at the Navy's Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare . . . The party line in Baghdad reflected the unimaginative approach that Sepp had seen coming from Rumsfeld's Pentagon. It was "kill-capture": Success was measured in the number of insurgents and top-level Baathists from the deck of playing cards who were eliminated. No one seemed able to explain why, with all the dead or detained, the number of insurgents kept increasing. The strategy was all wrong, Sepp realized. Instead of an emphasis on threats, it should have been on effects, the desired end-state, which would have put the center of action in the lives of Iraqis. "The most important thing is security -- the security of the people." Sepp said. "The problem was, we seized on the idea that our security was the most important thing. This is where there's some sacrifice involved. The people have to be secured first."
* * * *
The Bush administration, seeking an exit strategy, wanted to claim high numbers of trained forces in a hurry and went for bargain-basement soldiers and police. Sepp said, "It was a failure of military leadership to look at the political leadership and say, 'I appreciate that there's a presidential election coming up, but this is how it has to be done.'"
* * * *
The new Iraqi security forces, resenting their low pay and inferior equipment, seemed to feel that they were being asked to fight for the United States, not Iraq. Without the brutal discipline of Saddam's army, most of them were incapable of becoming cohesive fighting forces and quickly fell apart under fire. A CPA official said to me that a lot of the bravest, most dedicated, most idealistic Iraqis seemed to be fighting on the other side.
* * * *
From December [2004] through March [2005] -- between the Ramadan Offensive and the nationwide uprisings -- the CPA worked under the illusion that it was making real progress. Those were, relatively speaking, quiet months . . . Much of [the CPA's] plan eventually went the way of previous American blueprints, unable to survive prolonged contact with Iraqi reality.
. . . The problem lay in the hubris of the whole enterprise. "The CPA was set up to do a root and branch transformation of the country, and that wasn't what was required," said [Brad] Swanson [a Virginia investment banker who consulted for the CPA]. "What was required was to get two basic things right: security and economy. . . . this machine kept grinding on, creating structures as if they were going to be there for years to implement them. But then it just stopped [with the decision to speed up the handover to an Iraqi government] and the structures collapsed of their own weight with no enforcement, no real foundation."
* * * *
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. . . .
What made the political culture particularly unfortunate for Iraqis was that the Bush administration, instead of forging war into a truly national cause, conducted it from the beginning like the South Carolina primary. . . .
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 forces might eventually collide, at some risk to national interests.
* * * *
And when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the administration would have to admit it to the world. . . . Officials and generals who were responsible for scandal and failure would have to be given the sack, not a pat on the back or the Medal of Freedom.. . .
Character is fate. What prevented any of this from happening was, above all, the character of the president. Bush's war, like his administration, was run with his own absence of curiosity and self-criticism, his projection of absolute confidence, the fierce loyalty he bestowed and demanded. . . . 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.
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