The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq

by George Packer

Named one of the Best Books of 2005 by The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times Book Review, USA Today, Time, and New York magazine.
 
 The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq recounts how the United States set about changing the history of the Middle East and became ensnared in a guerrilla war in Iraq. It brings to life the people and ideas that created the Bush administration’s war policy and led America to the Assassins’ Gate—the main point of entry into the American zone in Baghdad.
 

The Assassins’ Gate also describes the place of the war in American life: the ideological battles in Washington that led to chaos in Iraq, the ordeal of a fallen soldier’s family, and the political culture of a country too bitterly polarized to realize such a vast and morally complex undertaking. George Packer’s best-selling first-person narrative combines the scope of an epic history with the depth and intimacy of a novel, creating a masterful account of America’s most controversial foreign venture since Vietnam.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Middle East, War, American History, Military Fiction

506 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2005

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

The gate referred to in the title is the entryway to the Green Zone. It is not one of the ancient structures one might find in this cradle of civilization but a modern construction put up by Saddam.

Packer begins by looking at the intellectual underpinnings of the Iraq War, not the WMD nonsense, but the neocon extremists who convinced themselves that we had a mission to bring democracy to the Middle East. Their motivations may not have been the same as Cheney’s but they dovetailed well. This is not a subject Packer approaches.

He explains his position as on the fence with a slight edge toward going in. His commentary indicates a Republican bias, to my eyes. That said, there is much that is worthwhile about this work. It is hardly a scientific approach, but it is an interesting one. He talks with people, in Iraq in various sub-groups, political, ethnic, religious and geographic, and thus provides a nuanced picture of the situation. I was reminded, in a way, of Doctorow’s The March in that by beaming one’s light broadly, one can acquire many of the elements that make up the whole and give one a good sense of the entrirety of the mess.

P 30
“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…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

p 50 – re Paul Berman
[Packer includes a considerable description of Berman as an intellectual researcher and a bit of a crank. He writes about how much of what is going on with Islamic terrorism is rooted not in the tradition of the religion but in modern times. He sees this movement as essentially totalitarian.:]
…why go to war with Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda?
Berman Answered: because Baathism was one of the “Muslim totalitarianisms,” the other being Islamism. The terror war was not just a police action or a military campaign. Like it was against fascism and the Cold War, it was an ideological war, a “mental war.” Victory required that millions of people across the Muslim world give up murderous political ideas. It would be a long, hard, complicated business. But the overthrow of Saddam and the establishment of an Iraqi democracy as a beachhead in the Middle East would show that the United States was on the side of the liberal-minded Arabs like Kanan Makiya and against the totalitarians and their ideas. Regime change would show that we, too, were capable of fighting for an idea—the idea of freedom. The willingness of liberal democracy to defend itself and fight for its principles is always in doubt. Alexis de Tocqueville worried about it; Hitler and Mussolini scoffed at it; so, more recently, did bin Laden. But the greatest affirmation of this willingness was made by Lincoln at Gettysburg, where he vowed that a nation (and not only his own—any nation) “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could long endure.

P 82
Packer claims that Saddam threw out inspectors in 1998 – I do not believe this is the case. See Hans Blix

Pps 84-85
He attacks anti-war elements in the US, calling them isolationist, uninterested in the details of a conflict, blinded by moral purpose

P 382 – more anti-liberal bile
He equates Michael Moore with rush Limbaugh. He also equates the hatred of Clinton, which was orchestrated by the Republican party and was not based on his performance with what he claims to be a rabid hatred of Bush, ignoring that whatever feelings are out there about Bush they are based on reaction to his performance, not based in political spookery.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In contrast to most news articles, this book is not especially partisan and certainly not ranting. Though it was very critical of the conduct of the war in Iraq, Packer, a reporter for the New Yorker, was at pains to describe what happened and explain why it was such as disaster. As Christopher Hitchens, in his review of the book, said, “His book rests on three main pillars: analysis of the intellectual origins of the Iraq war, summary of the political argument that preceded and then led to it, and firsthand description of the consequences on the ground.”

I was particularly interested in the intellectual origins in the neo-conservative ideas for changing America’s foreign policy from Kissinger’s “realpolitik” to something more moral, (or, in very simplistic terms—mine not theirs—not supporting nasty dictators who happened temporarily to support American interests but supporting the growth of freedom and democracy for people around the world. Packer was certainly not unsympathetic with this view, but he thought it took a dangerous wrong turn under the control of planners who basically refused to be put in touch with reality....

The war policy was primarily crafted by two men who were not idea men (Cheney and Rumsfeld) and one who was (Wolfowitz, who was a student of the late Allan Bloom—remember The Closing of the American Mind? —and even appeared briefly as a character in Saul Bellow’s novel about Bloom, Ravelstein). One of the contemporary ideas that the neoconservatives hated was “nation building”. UN peacekeeping was seen as having caused nothing but problems and the crafters of the Iraq strategy were utterly determined that the US should not involve itself in building nations. There were relatively simplistic plans for the occupation of Iraq, not because the war came up in such a rush there was no time to plan, but because Rumsfeld deliberately excluded it. He thought that postwar reconstruction in the 90ies fostered dependency. The “plan” really was to win the battle, clean up a few things and retire immediately.

Packer went to Iraq himself to see what was going on. He traveled back and forth from 2003 to 2005, visiting all parts of Iraq and all sorts of people: Americans in all capacities, Iraqis who were Shite, Sunni, Kurd, Christian; men, women and children, Iraqi émigrés who’d returned, those who wanted an Islamic republic and those who wanted a secular state, etc. The book is full of their stories, particularly that of Kanan Makiya whose books, Republic of Fear in 1989 (about Iraq under Saddam) and Cruelty and Silence in 1993 (about the betrayal of Iraqis after the Gulf War) influenced Packer. Packer actually knew Makiya in Cambridge before the war, had coffee and talked with him frequently but came to realize in Iraq how unrealistic Makiya's ideas and plans were. The book actually ends where it began, with the two chatting over coffee in the US and the last word is Makiya’s: “I think it was Ahmad [Chalabi:] who said of me that I embody the triumph of hope over experience”.

But there are other very moving stories, often of people that Packer visited with several times over a couple of years: a young woman who spent all her time figuring out how to get out of Iraq once that possibility arose, a Kurdish woman who’d been forcibly removed from her house when Saddam attempted the “Arabization” of Kirkuk, an Iraqi psychiatrist who longed to treat people’s minds but become a trauma doctor because of first the war and then the insurgency, an American father whose soldier son was killed—and many more.

The book is thoughtful and sane, designed to make readers understand the complexity.

If you’re interested in the title, here’s the first paragraph of the prologue (as well as a sample of Packer’s lovely prose): “In the shade of a high sandstone arch, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and a platoon of American soldiers from the First Armored Division guarded the main point of entry to the vast and heavily fortified Green Zone along the west bank of the Tigris River, where the Coalition Provisional Authority governed occupied Iraq. When I arrived in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 and first saw the arch, I mistook it for one of the city’s antique gates, built during the time of the caliphs to keep out Persian invaders. The American soldiers referred to it by a name that seemed to have come straight out of the Thousand and One Nights. They called it the Assassins’ Gate.” The gate turned out to have been built by Saddam in an antique style and it was called, Bab al-Qasr, the Palace Gate.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you only read one book about the Iraq War, make it this one.

Top to bottom, stem to stern. From the thought processes of Bush's White House to actual on the ground reporting in Baghdad, Packer takes you everywhere.

He is a direhard liberal who supported this war so there is no need to worry about his being too myopic. You meet fascinating people whom you probably won't hear about in everyday news and who are shaping history as we speak.

Small vingettes and large canvasses, ruminations and well-thought out critcism mesh with tactile descriptions and a novelists' characterization.

there's something here for everyone, whoever they are.

Dig in. This is the one your grandchildren will be reading in college. It's for the ages. A masterpiece.

Here's my review at Flak Magazine:

http://www.flakmag.com/books/assassin...

[R.f.k · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب يؤرخ عن الغزو الامريكي للعراق ..من الاستعداد للغزو وتخبط الادراة الامريكه وصناع القرار وجهلهم عن المنطقة..الى الاحتلال الامريكي ومابعدها من فوضى,والاقتتال الطائفي..كان لا يوجد هناك قانون فقط أحتلاال..
الكاتب هنا تحدث مع شخصيات عراقية وامريكيه..مغرمة بغزو العراق..وضح وجهات نظرهم..وذكر أحداث ووقائع ماقبل الغزو وأثناء الاحتلال الامريكي وأزمة الاكراد..وفترة حكم بول بريمر
لا أتذكر الاحداث قبل الغزو واثناء الاحتلال..وعن هذه الفترة بالذات كنت صغيرة..وساعدني هذا الكتاب
لمين يريد ان يقرا عن هذة الفترة أنصحة بهذا الكتاب
..أنني مهتمه جدا بهذةالفترة.. الكتاب تحدث عن هذة الفترة على الاقل من وجهه نظر امريكية ..لكنني سأبحث في الكتب العربية التي تتحدث عن هذه الفترة بدون تحيز وطائفيه..لكي تكتمل الصورة لدي
أنه كتاب تاريخي سياسي..لكنة مؤلم حقا..منذ الغزو الى يومنا هذا مازال أخبار العبوات الناسفة السيارات المفخخة تصلنا من العراق..ومزيد من الضحايا الابرياء
ما أشقى بلاد العرب
:(

[Mostafa · Rating 4 out of 5]

كنت، بمعرفة سطحية نوعاً ما، أسمي العراق جرح الأمة الغائر
وقرأت الكتاب، وأكد لي أن تلك التسمية التي انطلقت مني دون إلمام شمولي بتاريخ العراق، كانت في محلها بعد أن تعمقت في القراءة والإهتمام
كتاب هائل وشامل على نحو متقن، لمن أراد فهم العراق، ومن أراد فهم معنى كيف أن القوة العظمى تشُكل العالم والتاريخ والحاضر والماضي

[Doreen Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book but a war the US had and still does have no business being in. Nothing good can come out of the continued US presence in Iraq.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The US invasion of a rack began before the bombs fell in March 2003 and it continues to this date ( June 2016) with American troops still in a rock. This book is in excellent personal and political view of the more than a decade war that has embarrass the US and contributed to the distraction of a rock. It always takes some time for history to catch up with our chronology of it. But it is already clear that this is a war (another war) That had to be one by the people in the country where the war was taking place. The author takes a positive you of the Iraqi people and a negative view of many of the US perpetrators of the war especially Donald Rumsfeld who comes in for special criticism.

[Robert Ayotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Felt a bit directionless at first but ended up really enjoying this one. Unique in that it focuses a lot on the intellectual foundation for the war - trying to explain why certain ideas were in the bush admin at that specific time, why they had so much influence, etc. Really enjoyed it and thought the sections on domestic politics were super relevant even 20 years later.

Ends with very personal stories that hammered home the irreversible bleakness of Iraq’s messy sectarian relationships, how it fed into the Jan 2005 elections/ the future of the country, etc.

“Moral purpose combined with force, without knowledge or wisdom, can be more dangerous than indifference.”

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer in 2016—thirteen years after the war began, and more than a decade after the book’s publication. It was a strange experience, a little like reading an autopsy report long after the body has decomposed. The urgency was gone, the headlines were history, and the architects of the war had mostly faded into the think-tank ether or taken up post-retirement defense contracts. But even in its slightly dated tone, Packer’s book still flickered with insight—especially in the way it captured the gap between intention and impact, between ideology and geography, and between American certainty and Iraqi chaos.

Packer, a former staff writer at The New Yorker, walks a fine line between journalist, historian, and moral commentator. He’s not just recounting what happened in Iraq after 2003—he’s trying to understand how a war that began with soaring promises of liberation ended in humiliation, insurgency, and despair. What struck me most during that summer sabbatical reading was how The Assassins’ Gate is as much about the American imagination as it is about Iraq. It tells the story of a powerful nation that believed its own mythologies too deeply—and exported them with bombs and ballots.

The book gets its name from one of the entrances to the U.S. Green Zone in Baghdad—“The Assassins’ Gate.” It’s a title dripping with irony, emblematic of how easily noble intentions curdled into something sinister. The Gate, once imagined as a passage to democracy, quickly became a symbol of occupation, disillusionment, and the surreal nature of the American presence in Iraq. And Packer uses it well—as both literal setting and metaphor for a war that promised to open doors, only to slam them shut behind a fortress of concrete, checkpoints, and collateral damage.

What makes the book stand out—at least in its first half—is how effectively Packer profiles the “philosopher kings” of the Iraq invasion. He dives into the neoconservative brain trust of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith—not just to name names, but to examine the worldview that saw war as both a tool and a canvas. These were men who believed that history could be accelerated, that democracy could be imposed like software, and that the Middle East was waiting—aching, even—for a benevolent American bootprint. The problem, as Packer makes clear, is that they had never really met the people they claimed to be liberating.

But it’s not just a book about big ideas gone wrong. Some of the most affecting chapters are street-level narratives—of soldiers stationed in violent provinces, of idealistic aid workers trapped in Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and of Iraqis who survived Saddam only to be crushed under sectarian militias and foreign indifference. Packer’s moral compass is steady, even when his narrative structure meanders. He writes about Iraqis not as background noise, but as people—teachers, doctors, exiles—whose lives were caught in the crossfire of what he calls “a vision without understanding.”

Reading this in 2016, I found myself wondering whether the book’s impact had been blunted by the very events it tried to warn us about. So much had happened since 2005: the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS, the Syrian civil war, and the cynical recalibration of U.S. foreign policy under new presidents. Packer’s analysis felt grounded, but frozen in time. And yet, some observations still landed with eerie relevance—particularly his commentary on how power divorced from humility leads to disaster, and how the American belief in its own moral mission often leaves behind a trail of broken nations and bewildered allies.

Still, there were limits. At times, Packer feels too emotionally attached to the war’s idealistic premise. He doesn’t fall into cheerleading, but he doesn’t fully indict the imperial logic either. His critique is sharp, but it stops just short of moral fury. That ambiguity may be deliberate—after all, he interviewed people on all sides, and lived through the post-9/11 emotional tide that swept many liberals into reluctant support for the war. But as a reader in 2016—long after the war had been exposed as both strategically reckless and ethically fraught—I wanted more fire, more clarity. Some chapters felt less like analysis and more like weary reportage.

And yet, The Assassins’ Gate remains important. Not because it gets everything right, but because it captures the tragedy of good intentions severed from historical literacy. It’s not just a book about policy failure—it’s a meditation on the hubris of empire, the limits of liberal optimism, and the unbearable cost of trying to remake the world without truly understanding it.

Reading it today, one gets the sense that Iraq was not only a graveyard of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians—but also of the American idea itself: that democracy is a blueprint, and not a culture. That change is an export, not an organic evolution. That power, when cloaked in righteousness, becomes immune to doubt.

It didn’t feel urgent in 2016. But it did feel honest. And sometimes, that’s all we can ask from books that bear witness to failure.

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Packer is a fantastic writer, and there's some very good reporting in here as well. His writing on Iraq is both well-observed and emotionally moving. In addition, Packer does great work with the bureaucratic machinations that underlay the US invasion. So this book is worth reading, but with a massive caveat:

Packer spends relatively little time on the American domestic politics of the war, which is a good thing, because he is a piss-poor political analyst, and a deeply dishonest one to boot. His anti-war straw-men may not be numerous, but they are egregious nonetheless, especially in light of Packer's unwillingness to acknowledge his own errors in cheerleading the invasion. Such apologies wouldn't be necessary, of course, if Packer didn't go out of his way to belittle the American left in terms that bear scant relation to the actual US politics. He's like a journalistic Joe Lieberman, who believes that true political judgment is epitomized by a reflexive splitting of the difference between two opposing sides, regardless of the merits of their respective arguments.

His 2006 postscript is something of a corrective, but it's too little, too late.

Packer's arrogance and political idiocy mar what could otherwise have been a great book.

[Dylan Suher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've long said that George Packer is America's sneakiest writer, and nowhere is it more apparent than in this book. Reading him once again sully those figures opposed to the war, who happened to be exactly right, through innuendo and at the same time champion the likes of Kanan Makiya and Paul Wolfowitz as misguided idealists was nigh on unbearable. Also, he gives short shrift to the industrial side of what one perspicacious UN worker identifies as the "ideological-industrial complex" behind the war. There were as many war profiteers and defense contractors as there were zealous NeoCons behind this disaster. But Packer is also one of America's finest journalists and when it comes to detailing the concrete political and social developments of postwar Iraq, its people and its occupiers, he is unmatched and completely engrossing, almost in spite of himself. His New Yorker article on Pvt. Kurt Froheiser and his family, adapted here as a chapter, is my single favorite piece of writing on the war.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Packer on Iraq is that odd case of someone who called for this war and then realized their mistake. There's a lot of interesting things here, and really compelling writing, but around the edges there is a fuzziness of concept that all the good tracing of the intellectual structure of the war's other authors cannot mask. Still, Packer's direct experiences in Iraq are valuable. Given its publication date, this book could never serve as your introduction to or overview of the American hubris in Iraq, but it is a valuable supplement.

[John Tobelmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

George Packer is a brilliant writer. He takes complicated situations and subjects and weaves them into the stories of individuals who are actually experiencing those subjects. In this case, the Iraq war from a year or so before we invaded [really as soon as Bush took office in Jan 2001] through the first democratic elections held in late 2004. The issues discussed and followed up on dealt with whether this was a just war, the reasons for going into Iraq, how the USA handled it and how the Iraqis reacted and felt about it. Packer spent years in and out of Iraq embedded with US forces, befriending native Iraqis, befriending exiled Iraqis and getting all their stories including those of the people managing the war and occupation. Fascinating stories.

My takeaway was that there were definitely good reasons for going into Iraq - Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator slaughtering his own citizens being the main one. Bringing a liberal democracy to the Middle East being another. Neither of these reasons ended up being the real reason in the end.
Washington Neocons wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East. Exiled Iraqis wanted the same thing but on their own terms. Native Iraqis just wanted the brutal reign of terror to end. Bush's real motives are not really known but I suspect he just wanted revenge for an attempt on his father's life. Cheyney and Rumsfeld ended up being in charge and their motives are less understood.

Rumsfeld tied the hands of the US forces by not funding the war in the beginning and not allocating enough resources -forces and money. All the carnage in Iraq could have been avoided had Rumsfeld's attitude not been "Let's get in there in April and be out of there by August and let the Iraqis deal with the aftermath." That would be the bottom line. The Iraqis had no idea what to do after decades of being told what to do or else. They were ill-equipped to rule themselves. We left them without sufficient security and we did not provide enough funding to ensure basic amenities like electricity. I could go on and on....

[Rolf Kirby · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force of reporting and commentary from the early part of the Iraq war. Packer writes of the streets of Bagdhad, the Green Zone, and Kurdistan. He weaves strands of history and current events into a compelling whole.
His conclusions in the final chapters are utterly damning to the Bush administration, which so hastily dove into the war. The lack of planning for the aftermath and occupation is infuriating, and shows the administration to have failed in the big task it assigned itself. (Noted is the objection that the task actually was to award big no bid contracts to political favorites, and in this the GOP succeeded mightily)
"The war revealed what was already obvious to experienced soldiers and should have been to civilian idealists: moral purpose comined with force, without knowledge and wisdom, can be more dangerous than indifference."

[Khalaf Alshammari · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب مهم يعرض الوضع في العراق قبل وبعد الحرب من زوايا ووجهات نظر متعددة.
يصف الكاتب الأحداث التي سبقت الحرب من سوء التحضير والفهم غير الواضح لطبيعة المنطقة من قبل صناع القرار في أمريكا وعدم وضوح الأهداف من الحرب محللا أسباب الفوضى التي نتجت.
ثم يرسم المؤلف تأثير التغييرات بعد الحرب على العراقيين من مختلف الفئات والطبقات عبر شخصيات عايشها وحاورها بنفسه.

[Tariq A · Rating 4 out of 5]

عرض مطوَّل لحالة التخبط التي عاشتها الحكومة الأمريكية قبل وأثناء احتلال العراق.

[David Kraemer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was too young in 2002 to understand the arguments for and against the Iraq war. By the time I had politically come of age, the consensus among educated liberals was the war had been a colossal mistake. It is now a common, if entirely conspiratorial, belief that America only intervenes in the Middle East when there's oil to be stolen.

This reflects a kind of intellectual laziness, even as the headline conclusion stays fixed for me after reading The Assassin's Gate. Indeed, it is hard to read George Packer's account of the pre-war and early post-Saddam Iraq years without concluding it was a mistake. Of what exactly becomes a harder question. If you ever felt that Bashar Al-Assad ought to be punished for crossing a line in his Civil War, then you don't have a credible way to distinguish this kind of intervention with the pur ported invasion of Iraq. Saddam was a Bad Guy, and his Badness came on different axes, from genocide of Kurds to stockpiling chemical weapons to flouting international law and aggressively mocking the United Nations.

At various points during the first two chapters, you will be persuaded by some aspect of the principle neoconservative arguments for Saddam's ouster. The 9/11 attacks only heightened the perception of a connection. But it is impossible to read the remainder of the book, which details the overthrow of Saddam through the year 2005, without feeling hopeless at the criminal inadequacy and negligence of the American occupation period. Policy failures beginning from the White House to the Pentagon and only eventually those made on Iraqi soil plagued the administration. The breakdown of all normal modes of critical self-reflection between the President and Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense is shocking to behold. The internecine fights between State and Defense over priorities and authority on the ground in Iraq boggle the mind.

All the while, life for Iraqis goes from bad to better to worse. However justified Saddam's ouster in the abstract, the view from 2005 was not unambiguous that life had improved for an Iraqi citizen. The book ends before the 2006-07 troop surge and the new directions and premature withdrawal enacted by the Obama administration. This is far from the final word on Iraq. But it certainly complicates a picture of the war that has settled in the uninvested mind over the last decade.

One part of The Assassins Gate surprise me reading in 2019: the eminent reasonableness of the position of Joe Biden, then the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Apprehensive but plainly persuaded by the moral case of Saddam's ouster, Biden became one of the chief sources of Congressional oversight of the Bush administration and frequently provided the only major voice of dissent to its continued negligence.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Packer is critical of specific people and decisions without coming across as partisan. It’s like he went to Iraq just to find out how the war and the “peace” were going, and when the answer turned out to be “poorly and getting worse”, he looked for reasons why. Packer also tries to unearth signs for Iraq’s future. It makes me want to look more closely at Iraq now. This book also made me wish we had the Biden of 20 years ago as president instead of the Biden of today, but age comes for us all (if we’re lucky). In any case, Packer sums it up best when he says that the Bush administration ran the whole venture “like the South Carolina primary”. They didn’t adequately plan for the reality of regime change, and when things weren’t cheap and easy, they stuck to the talking points and budgets that they thought would garner votes rather than would help the Iraqis and ease the job tasked to US soldiers and employees in Iraq. They refused to admit problems or own mistakes, so they snowballed. Packer exploring this and the implications through a variety of one-on-one interactions with a variety of soldiers, US employees, and Iraqis, is sometimes interesting and sometimes just repetitive and obvious at this point. No doubt this book was more important when it came out; almost 20 years later, its conclusions are not particularly surprising or helpful.

[Serena]

for whatever reason i cannot bring myself to read anything unless it's for work. this book is made up of some very finely observed reporting and thoughtful analysis, sandwiched between confusing and pointless rambling. i will never wrap my head around neocons... and also george packer you are a weird pervert. how many times could the word "pornographic" come up in a nonfiction book about the American occupation of Iraq? at least twenty times...

[Melisa Sahinkaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

no matter how many examples i see, in awe of how the concept of “americans in the middle east” is so repetitively incompatible with reality in the region that it’s bound to blow up. reference to present day intended.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very solid book about America's involvement in Iraq. It doesn't quite reach the heights of a few others (say, The Forever War), but it's still in the top tier.

It particularly excels when illustrating the American and exiled-Iraqi perspective, as opposed to that of the locals on the ground, where it feels similar to a lot of other books out there. There's some good background about the neocon movement, and some differentiation between the motives of the different individuals (Wolfowitz, Makiya, the American military leadership) as it rumbled from 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq. There's also some good treatment of the experience of ordinary Americans who went to Iraq to try to manage its transition to peace, and how they were repeatedly frustrated by lack of planning and underestimation of the scope of the problem.

For me, the biggest lesson of the book is that in modern war, where a superpower takes on a much lesser opponent, the military victory itself is merely the end of part 1. The subsequent long tail of occupation and transition to independence is really where most of the dollars are spent and the lives are lost, and therefore it demands far more planning and care than the initial military victory itself. Setting aside the question of whether the war itself made sense or not, if we were going to carry out the war, we had to be properly planned for the occupation, and we weren't; American leaders convinced themselves that the occupation would be far easier than it was.

But a second, more subtle lesson for me: we got into Iraq in part because many American leaders and their advisers held fervent beliefs about democracy and Iraq that certainly sounded good and moral and right. Many of them genuinely believed that Iraq would naturally flourish if we overthrew Saddam Hussein and gave it liberal democracy. I mean, it still sounds great, by all accounts Hussein was a legitimately terrible person, liberal democracy has been the abode of some of the world's most prosperous countries, and in an alternate universe if they had succeeded, people like Bush and Wolfowitz might have been among history's heroes. You never get the benefit of hindsight when you make decisions.

The problem was that there was not enough second-guessing and self-doubt, not enough airtime given to people who might believe something different. For me, reading this book, I believe this came from the neocons' zealotry. It's always easy to convince yourself that your beliefs are the right one, and even easier if you infuse it with the mindset of a crusade. So watch out for crusaders, discount what they have to say, and don't fall into the trap of self-reinforcement. You do not need to be a zealot to believe in making the world a better place.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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. Richard Haass 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.”

An impressively incisive and concise history of America's involvement in Iraq under the George W. Bush administration. With his characteristic mix of deep research and excellent interviews, George Packer presents all the complexity of this grand failure with clarity and tact. I feel grateful for it as a history lesson, as I was relatively too young to understand all of the intricacies of the war while it was happening (and yet some could argue it is still happening). Particularly, I came away with a better understanding of how murky this war was to begin with and how it did not cleanly divide people along party lines. George Packer is a gift, and in these days of the Trump regime, we could all do more to study the mistakes presidents have made—and will continue to make—in the days to come.

“I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.”

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Packer has written a truly enlightening and intriguing book about our descent into Iraq. Packer is a lucid and engaging writer who can clearly summarize the intellectual debate between the neoconservatives and the realists. It's also a sad book. Learning how policy is arrived out and then justified and implemented can be very discouraging.

The neocons and Bush had decided to go after Iraq for a variety of reasons before 9/11. The concern then became how to sell that decision. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad Paul Wolfowitz fold an interviewer: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S, government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction." The real rationale for the war was to realign American power in the Middle East, toward a democratic society and away from Saudi Arabia, home of the Wahhabi sect that virtually controlled Saudi society and government and had been the home to almost all of the 9/11 terrorists. (See Sandra MacKey's very excellent book on Saudi Arabia -- The Saudis Inside the Desert Kingdom -- for a detailed view of what it's like to live in such a theocracy.)

The job then became to selectively use pieces of intelligence that supported their common justification. "Just a year earlier, Iraq had been viewed as an outlaw state that was beginning to slip free of international constraints and might present a threat to the region or, more remotely, the United States in five years or so. Now, suddenly, there wasn't a day to be lost. . . It didn't matter that there was no strong evidence to back up the doomsday prognosis."

[Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Packer's work is well written, organized, and clearly evokes the individual experience he went through as he reported on Iraq from 2003 and 2004. His insight to the build-up in 2002 and early 2003 is quite insightful, digging at issues deeper than what was readily available to the American public at the time. When he gets into the war, and subsequent 'civil war', of Iraq he is able to navigate Iraqi and American perspectives very well. In fact this is the real strength of his book. He knows all the people, situations, and centerpiece issues/controvery/debates and can write them in a clear manner for the reader without losing the depth and significance of each topic (or person). It indicates he not only knows his subject matter well, but has thought about it, re-approached it, researched it, and thought it over again. This is not a memoir, but rather an insightful perspective on Iraq.

The only two problems I saw with the book were some quotations, and when it was published. There were a few quotes he had that were not obvious at all who they came from. This is especially true in the first one-hundred pages of the book. As for the latter problem. It is not that it was published in 2005/06, but that as well written as it is Packer should have kept going. Maybe he will write a subsequent work on Iraq since 2006 (when the afterword is dated). He hits the nail on the head for the years he covers, and does it so well that any reader would wonder what he thinks or has uncovered since 2005/06. Indeed insight of this kind for the last two years of President Bush's administration, and Iraq under Obama would be great to read and helpful in navigating the early but prosperous field of studying the recent Iraq war.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really good book for getting at least part of the story of why we ended up in Iraq and why we're letting this unravel on us. Hate to put my cultural bias out on the street, but after getting halfway through I lost interest in the chapters that focus on the Iraqis, as their experiences all seemed to be the same (very bad for them, but with little ability to make any changes for the better). The chapters on the Americans and coalition give us some insight as to why we're having such problems over there, and how we made such dumb mistakes at the beginning, in 2002-2003-2004 (Not why, mind you -- Packer can't fully explain WHO made the call to ignore reconstruction operations, kick out all the Ba'athists, and dismiss the Iraqi army, but given the way this administration works I don't think anyone will be able to get to that truth for at least a few more years).

If you're interested in how we got to where we are in Iraq, I think this book is superior to Woodward's State of Denial and what I've read of Fiasco by Ricks and Cobra II by Trainor. However, this is not - can't be - the whole story. Until some young Halberstam makes the effort (and gets the real uncensored access to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, and Wolfowitz) to pulish this war's version of the Best and The Brightest, Packer's book must serve as the best we've got as to how we ended up in this situation.

The best thing, though, if to read all of the books mentioned in this post in order to get the most complete idea of why this war ended up the way it did - if one has the time, which I don't, at least not now.

[Sean Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Packer was an earlier supporter of the war in Iraq, and for that, he deserves to get called out at every event he speaks at. But, he is also an incredible writer, and Assassin’s Gate is the best written book I have read on the war. Packer moves between DC and Iraq from the beginning of the plans for the war to the (almost) present, and you can feel his disgust with the Bush administration grow and his hope for Iraq fail as the book progresses.

Assassin’s Gate is an excellent read, and a good primer on the basic outline of the lead up to the war, but where the book really shines is in the profiles of people caught up by the war, whether that’s anti Saddamist Iraqi exiles, US soldiers, or young women in Baghdad. It’s a popular book, so you’re not going to get all that much depth, but the personal stories make it well worth the read.

[Santiago Paz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a carefully-written, well-thought analysis of the mistakes that led the US to be stuck with the disaster that Irak is right now. Also, it's an in-depth analysis of why Irak is a very complicated example of why the Middle East is such a volatile, violence-prone, region.

This book is a list of mistakes that lead the effort to become a political and military disaster. It's intention is to keep ourselves honest. To shed light on what was deliberately hidden, in order to save face and spread fake triumphalism. It's a monumental effort by George Packer and its invaluable, because it's not a bunch of documents or pompous analysis: it's a story told by the people that took part in this disaster, whether for good or bad.

[Michelle Sweet · Rating 4 out of 5]

An assigned read - really enjoyed the politics and human stories entwined..worth the read.

[Byron Eppler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic look on the early years of the iraq war and also understanding the neoconservatism ideology that underpinned much of the decision-making. Admirably objective.

[Marsha Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

a liberal's view of Iraq War. it would have been better if Biden wasn't his source for a clear head and the Republicans mentioned weren't just written as one sided