The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq - Hardcover

Packer, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374299633 ISBN 13: 9780374299637

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

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 guerilla 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 consequences of that policy are shown in the author’s brilliant reporting on the ground in Iraq, where he made four tours on assignment for The New Yorker. We see up close the struggles of American soldiers and civilians and Iraqis from all backgrounds, thrown together by a war that followed none of the preconceived scripts.

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 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.

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of several books, most recently Blood of the Liberals, winner of the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Award. He is also the editor of the anthology The Fight Is for Democracy. He lives in Brooklyn.

Winner of the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award for Best Nonfiction Book on International Affairs

Winner of the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award

A New York Times Best Book of the Year

A New York Times Notable Book

A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year

A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

 

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 guerilla 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 consequences of that policy are shown in the author's reporting on the ground in Iraq, where he made four tours on assignment for The New Yorker. We see up close the struggles of American soldiers and civilians and Iraqis from all backgrounds, thrown together by a war that followed none of the preconceived scripts.

The Assassins' Gate also describes the place of the war in America 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 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.

"A comprehensive look at the largest foreign policy gamble in a generation, by a New Yorker reporter who traces the full arc of the war, from the pre-invasion debate through the action on the ground."—The New York Time Book Review

"A comprehensive look at the largest foreign policy gamble in a generation, by a New Yorker reporter who traces the full arc of the war, from the pre-invasion debate through the action on the ground."—The New York Time Book Review

 

"Masterful . . . Packer's sketch of the prewar debates is subtle, sharp and poignant . . . His reporting from Iraq was always good, but the book is even better, putting the reader at the side of Walter Benjamin's angel of history, watching helplessly as the wrechage unfolds at his feet."—Gideon Rose, The Washington Post Book World

 

"A deftly constructed and eloquently told account of the war's origins and aftermath . . . Although he works in snapshots and anecdotes, every time an image might allow him to settle into a simple conclusion about the war's worthiness, he turns his attention—and his considerable powers of description and dramatization—to another image that points to the opposite conclusion. The cumulative effect is a wrenching cognitive dissonance—the kind, Packer observes, that few Americans can stand but with which Iraqis live every day . . . Packer makes it deeply human and maddeningly vivid."—Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Los Angeles Book Review

 

"[Packer] has succeeded in creating a book that is not only relevant but discerning and provocative. Using on-the-ground reporting and a talent for storytelling, he offers the vivid detail and balanced analysis that have made him one of the leading chroniclers of the Iraq war."—Yonatan Lupu, San Francisco Chronicle

 

"Packer covers the same ground as the other authors — the war dreamed up by fevered minds in Washington, the strange world of diaspora politics, the lack of planning in the Department of Defense, the occupation, and the insurgency — but he does it from the perspective of a journalist rather than of a participant. The result is a beautifully written, poignant, and fair-minded narrative of two dreams deferred."—Mark Leonard, The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

"Read George Packer's book The Assassin's Gate . . . And I wish . . . I had been able to help George Packer write that book. In some places I could have given him a hell of a lot more specifics . . . But if you want to read how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book. And, of course, there are other names in there, Under Secretary of Defense Doug Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Frank said was the 'stupidest blankety blank man in the world.' He was. Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. And yet, and yet, after the Secretary of State agrees to a $400 billion department, rather than a $30 billion department, having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw themselves in a closet somewhere. That's not making excuses for the State Department. That's telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. Read George's book."—Larry Wilkerson

 

"A brilliant new book."—Richard Holbrooke, The Washington Post

 

"[Packer's] own reportage of the effects of the war on the individuals involved . . . [is] much fresher and more compelling."—The Boston Globe

 

"Brutal analyses and trenchant on-the-spot reportage for the New Yorker magazine over the past two years provide the core of this devastating critique . . . Mr. Packer brilliantly describes the evolving mindset of the neoconservatives who took hold of policy towards Iraq in the run-up to the war, as well as the hopes and arguments of their assorted Iraqi allies in exile . . . Where he scores most is in his portraying the psychology of Iraqis, their ambivalence to the liberation/occupation . . . . Mr. Packer empathizes with them in all their diversity, drawing a remarkable cast of sharply defined characters."—The Economist

 

"George Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, blends on-the-scene reporting and thoughtful analysis in a sobering account of the unfinished war in Iraq and its impact on Americans and Iraqis. He cheers the demise of Saddam, while questioning a war with deep roots in history, but far from inevitable."—USA Today

 

"The Assassins' Gate is almost certain to stand as the most comprehensive journalistic account of the greatest foreign-policy debacle in U.S. history . . . the best book yet about the Iraq war . . . Packer is a rare combination: an excellent reporter, a sophisticated analyst and a fine writer. He was also ubiquitous. No other journalist can match the breadth of Packer's Iraq coverage . . . exceptional—varied, empathetic and intelligent . . . The Assassins' Gate is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the terrible predicament in which we now find ourselves, how we got there, and why we must not repeat the same tragic mistake."—Gary Kamiya, Salon

 

"Wrenching dispatches from the heart of the war that won't end."—New York Magazine

 

"The great strength of George Packer's book is that it gives a fair hearing to both views. Free of cant—but not, crucially, of anger—Mr. Packer has written an account of the Iraq war that will stand alongside such narrative histories as A Bright Shining Lie, Fire in the Lake and Hell in a Very Small Place. As a meditation on the limits of American power, it's sobering. As a pocket history of Iraq and the United States' tangled history, it's indispensible. As an examination of the collision between arrogance and goo...

About this title

About the Author

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of several books, most recently Blood of the Liberals (FSG, 2000), winner of the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Award. He is also the editor of the anthology The Fight Is for Democracy. He lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

Packer has written the most definitive account to date of the Iraq War, thanks to exceptional reporting and wide-ranging research that put the U.S. invasion into its true historical and political context. Even with the outcome of the war uncertain—and no end of the U.S. occupation in sight—The Assassins’ Gate will likely stand for years to come as the seminal book chronicling what one critic called "the greatest foreign policy debacle in U.S. history." Critics—who seemed to be opponents of the war themselves—praised Packer’s fealty to the truth even when it clashed with his support for the invasion. Packer may bring few new facts to light, but he weaves together a powerful and all-encompassing narrative that personalizes a nation’s ambivalence and disillusionment.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Adult/High School–This well-researched, articulate, journalistic account details the United States ideology that fomented the war in Iraq that began in the spring of 2003, the planning (actually the lack of it) that went into dealing with the country after Saddam Husseins expected fall, and the consequences of marrying political ideology to military strategy and the treatment of intelligence. A longtime, well-read student of modern Iraq, Packer writes from personal observation and interviews with decision makers or their staff, and he knows the territory. He has previously written several articles for The New Yorker that reflect some of the conclusions drawn in this book, but most of it is fresh. He was definitely a supporter of this war for many years before March 2003, in large part because he knew many Iraqi émigrés and refugees, and despised Saddam Hussein and the Baath party that supported him. Packer concludes: The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive. Students who want a balanced account of this war and its consequences would do well to read this book.–Alan Gropman, National Defense University, Washington, DC
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance: The psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross came up with her famous five stages of grief to describe how patients react to the discovery that they are terminally ill, but these phases apply to other traumas too. With regard to the debacle playing out in Iraq, for example, the White House and its die-hard supporters are still in denial, while most of their Democratic critics are stuck at anger. Policy wonks have moved on to the bargaining phase, debating how much of the original mission to sacrifice in return for a way out. Depression is likely to set in as the full extent of the calamity becomes clear; acceptance is a long way off.

How did this happen? How could the strongest power in modern history, going to war against a much lesser opponent at a time and place of its own choosing, find itself stuck a few years later, hemorrhaging blood and treasure amid increasing chaos? Americans will be debating the answer for decades, and as they do, they are unlikely to find a better guide than George Packer's masterful new The Assassins' Gate.

In the run-up to the 2003 war, three rationales were offered for the invasion: fear of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, links between Iraq and terrorism, and a desire to bring liberal democracy to Iraq and the Middle East at large. The first was essentially an honest mistake; almost all knowledgeable observers thought Iraq was hiding prohibited weapons programs, although they disagreed about how to handle the problem and the fears proved overblown. The second was essentially a dishonest one; there were never any good reasons to think Iraq was connected to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or likely to work closely with al Qaeda. The third rationale, meanwhile, was a high-stakes gamble. Saddam Hussein's tyranny was just as brutal as the Bush administration charged, and the Middle East's general economic, social and political stagnation had indeed helped fuel the rise of violent Islamist extremism. Yet few experts thought it would be possible to transform Iraq's domestic structures quickly or easily, to say nothing of sparking a regional democratic revolution.

In this book, Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker, tells the story of this third rationale -- how it emerged, how the Bush administration tried to implement it and how things turned out on the ground. The United States would not have gone to war just to spread democracy in the Middle East (as even the war's intellectual architect, former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, acknowledged), but the case for democratization played an important role in buttressing the other two arguments and was the most exciting aspect of the endeavor for neoconservatives and liberals alike. When WMD stockpiles failed to materialize, moreover, the quest for democracy became the prime rationale for ongoing operations, gaining greater significance after the fact than it had beforehand. All this makes Packer's volume important and timely.

The book is framed by the story of Kanan Makiya, an idealistic Iraqi exile whose writings had exposed the evil of Saddam Hussein's republic of fear and who had come to see American power as Iraq's only hope for a better future. Desperate to do "the right thing [even if it was] being done by the wrong people," Makiya threw in his lot with some slippery fellow exiles and various American factions all pursuing their own agendas. He was ultimately ushered into the Oval Office to tell President Bush that a grateful Iraqi public "will greet the troops with sweets and flowers."

A hawkish liberal himself, Packer was torn between his sympathy for Makiya's goals and his misgivings about whether they were likely to be achieved. "I would run down the many compelling reasons why a war would be unwise, only to find at the end that Saddam was still in power, tormenting his people and defying the world," he writes. "The administration's war was not my war -- it was rushed, dishonest, unforgivably partisan, and destructive of alliances -- but objecting to the authors and their methods didn't seem reason enough to stand in the way." Eventually, crossing his fingers and deciding that Saddam Hussein had to be considered the greater evil, he went along for the ride (as did I).

Packer's sketch of the prewar debates is subtle, sharp and poignant. His book truly picks up, however, once the wheels of history have been set in motion. Writing with barely suppressed fury and continued bafflement, he describes how the great and noble enterprise he supported is inexplicably handed over to those least qualified to make it work: "No one at the top level of the administration was less interested in the future of Iraq than Donald Rumsfeld. Yet he would demand and receive control over the postwar, and he would entrust it to his more ideologically fervent aides, in whom he placed the same incurious confidence that the president placed in Rumsfeld."

The result -- depressingly familiar by now from the writings of James Fallows, Larry Diamond and others, including Packer himself -- has been one of the worst self-inflicted wounds in the history of U.S. foreign policy. The military leadership under Gen. Tommy Franks abdicated any responsibility for seeing the war through to completion; the civilian leadership at the Pentagon and in the vice president's office kept their own mysterious counsel while blocking others from doing anything useful; a feckless president surrounded by sycophants and ideologues seemed barely to understand what was going on around him.

So the Baathist regime falls quickly, Americans occupy Baghdad, everybody holds their breath to see what will happen next, and the answer is -- nothing. Thuggish Iraqis grow bolder as crime goes unpunished; decent Iraqis grow despondent as the occupying troops stand down and let chaos unfold. American occupation officials, Packer writes, eventually "did a rough calculation of the economic cost of the looting in those early weeks. The figure they came up with was $12 billion, canceling out the projected revenues of Iraq for the first year after the war. The gutted buildings, the lost equipment, the destroyed records, the damaged infrastructure, would continue to haunt almost every aspect of the reconstruction. But the physical damage was less catastrophic than those effects that couldn't be quantified. Iraqis' first experience of freedom was chaos and violence; the arrival of the Americans brought an end to the certainty of political terror and at the same time unleashed new, less certain fears." Or as Rumsfeld put it, "stuff happens."

Soon even Washington realized that things were not going well, and the first postwar team was abruptly sent packing. As Jay Garner and his hapless Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance were replaced by L. Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority, a U.S. official tells Packer, the American approach shifted from "arrogance" to "hubris": "The arrogance phase was going in undermanned, underresourced, skim off the top layer of leadership, take control of a functioning state, and be out by six weeks and get the oil funds to pay for it. We all know for a variety of reasons that didn't work. So then you switch over to the hubris phase . . . we'll attack it with everything we have, we'll throw the many billion dollars at it, and to make Iraq safe for the future we have to do a root-and-branch transformation of the country in our own image."

That didn't work either, in part because ill-considered early decisions to pursue radical de-Baathification and disband the Iraqi army led many in the country's Sunni minority to oppose the occupation. Eventually the Bush administration shifted course again, transferring power to an Iraqi interim government and scheduling nationwide elections. In one sense, those elections, held this past January, were a triumph, with 8 million Iraqis braving insurgent attacks to take part in an extraordinary display of democratic procedure and confidence in a self-determined future. But in another sense, they were a warning sign; Sunnis generally boycotted the vote, fearing that they would lose the privileged perch they'd enjoyed under the old dictatorship to the country's newly empowered Shiite majority, and the country stepped closer to open communal conflict.

Packer relates all this clearly and briskly, painting moving portraits of both Iraqis and Americans while skillfully guiding the reader through the intricacies of colonial administration, Iraqi ethnic politics and Beltway skullduggery. His reporting from Iraq was always good, but the book is even better, putting the reader at the side of Walter Benjamin's angel of history, watching helplessly as the wreckage unfolds at his feet. At the end, he revisits Kanan Makiya, chastened by his brush with actual Iraqi politics and now withdrawn from the fray, trying to save a few fragments from the ruins.

Ultimately, Packer refuses to tie the threads of his analysis together in a tidy bundle and settle accounts. He closes by stating the big questions about Iraq's transformation -- "Would it succeed? How could it have been done better? If it couldn't be done right, should it have been done at all?" -- but leaves the answers to history and the reader's own judgment. Given the sorry tale he has just told, this seems something of a cop-out. But it is also not entirely unreasonable, for although events in Iraq have now largely passed out of Washington's control, there is still a remote possibility that the worst outcomes -- full-scale civil war or a completely failed state -- might be kept at bay, leaving the ending of one of the cruelest tyrannies in modern history as an accomplishment worth savoring.

It is not too soon, however, to return a judgment on those at the helm who took a difficult job and made it infinitely more so, dramatically undermining America's regional and global position in the process. They were "careless people," as Fitzgerald said of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." That, if nothing else, can stand as a lesson for future tender souls contemplating the possible benefits of liberal imperialism and mulling attempts to do the right thing with the wrong partners.

Reviewed by Gideon Rose
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

[Signature]Reviewed by Christopher HitchensIt is extremely uncommon for any reporter to read another's work and to find that he altogether recognizes the scene being described. Reading George Packer's book, I found not only that I was remembering things I had forgotten, but also that I was finding things that I ought to have noticed myself. 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. In each capacity, Packer shows himself once more to be the best chronicler, apart perhaps from John Burns of the New York Times, that the conflict has produced. (I say "once more" because some of this material has already appeared in the New Yorker.)A very strong opening section traces the ideas, and the ideologists, of the push for regime change in Iraq. Packer is evidently not a neoconservative, but he provides an admirably fair and lucid account of those who are. There is one extraordinary lacuna in his tale—he manages to summarize the long debate between the "realists" and the "neocons" without mentioning Henry Kissinger—but otherwise he makes an impressively intelligent guide. Of value in itself is the ribbonlike presence, through the narrative, of the impressive exile Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, upon whom Packer hones many of his own ideas. (I should confess that I myself make an appearance at this stage and, to my frustration, can find nothing to quarrel with.)The argument within the administration was not quite so intellectual, but Packer takes us through it with insight and verve, giving an excellent account in particular of the way in which Vice President Cheney swung from the "realist" to the "neocon" side. And then the scene shifts to Iraq itself. Packer has a genuine instinct for what the Iraqi people have endured and are enduring, and writes with admirable empathy. His own opinions are neither suppressed nor intrusive: he clearly welcomes the end of Saddam while having serious doubts about the wisdom of the war, and he continually tests himself against experience. The surreal atmosphere of Paul Bremer's brief period of palace rule is very well caught, but the outstanding chapter recounts a visit to the northern city of Kirkuk and literally "walks" us through the mesh of tribal, ethnic and religious rivalry. The Iraq debate has long needed someone who is both tough-minded enough, and sufficiently sensitive, to register all its complexities. In George Packer's work, this need is answered. (Oct. 15)Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His book Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (HarperCollins) was published last week.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

It is a pleasure to find a work that strives for balance, fairness, and understanding in surveying the causes and course of the ongoing Iraqi war. Packer is a staff writer for the New Yorker and has traveled extensively in Iraq during the war. He covers a broad range of topics, beginning with an analysis of the mind-set of some of the neocons who ardently championed the ousting of Saddam Hussein. Packer is clearly unsettled by the moral certainty of men like Paul Wolfowitz, but he also admires their commitment to ideals of freedom and democracy. Packer compassionately describes the anguish of returning Iraqi exiles, as they see their hopes for a free, prosperous homeland frustrated by the insurgency. Finally, he describes the effects of war on individual American soldiers and their families, as well as on Iraqi civilians. This is a troubling but deeply moving examination of a struggle that seems far from resolution. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from The Assassins' Gate by George Packer. Copyright © 2005 by George Packer. Published in October 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Prologue

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 into 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.
Early every morning, before the sun grew dangerous, crowds of Iraqis gathered at the Assassins’ Gate. Some were job seekers; others were protesters carrying banners—“Please Re-open Our Factories,” “We Wish to See Mr. Frawley.” Demonstrators brought their causes here and sometimes turned into rioters. A man handed out copies of a table printed in English and Arabic and titled “The Names of Victims of execution of my family.” Many people carried letters addressed to L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq. With the old order overthrown, the Baath Party authorities purged, and the ministries stripped bare by looters, most Iraqis didn’t know where to take their grievances and petitions, where to unload the burden of their personal histories. So, like supplicants to the caliph of ancient Baghdad, they brought them directly to the front gate of the occupation. But few Iraqis had the credentials to enter the Green Zone, and interpreters at the gate were rare. The Iraqis stood on one side of coils of concertina wire, gesturing and trying to explain why they needed to get in; on the other side stood Americans doing twelve-hour shifts of checkpoint duty in body armor, keeping them out.
One day in July, a tiny woman in a salmon-colored veil stepped out of the crowd and thrust a handwritten letter up at me. She was a schoolteacher, about thirty, with glasses and thick white face powder and an expression so exaggeratedly solemn that she might have been a mime performing grief. The letter, which was eighteen pages long, requested an audience with “Mister respectable, merciful American ambassador Pawal Bramar.” It contained a great deal of detailed advice on the need to arm the Iraqi people so they could help fight against the guerrilla resistance. The teacher, who was well under five feet tall, wanted permission to carry an AK-47 and work alongside American soldiers against the beasts who were trying to restore the tyrant or bring Iranian-style oppression. She showed me the fake gun permit drawn up to illustrate her desire. She had left her position teaching English at a girls’ school in the Shiite slum called Sadr City, rather than submit to the dictates of the radical Muslims who had taken charge after the overthrow of Saddam and ordered the staff to poison the girls’ minds against the Americans.
“In the beginning, the Americans treat Iraqi people well,” the teacher said. “But later, because Iraqis are beasts, they attack Americans and kill them, and this will affect Americans’ psychology badly and so they live in more isolation from Iraqi people.” She had information—it came from the most reliable source in Baghdad, she said, the children in the street—that the tyrant and his followers were cutting off the heads of Americans (this was almost a year before the first known beheading in Iraq). The stories had made her ill. She was having trouble sleeping, she said, and had all but stopped eating.
A man with a cane hobbled over from the line. His left hand, wrapped in a bandage, was missing the thumb. He explained to the teacher in Arabic that his father had been killed by a missile in the Iran-Iraq War, that he had been paralyzed in a car accident while fleeing Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War, and that at some point he had lost the piece of paper entitling him to hospital care. Now that the Americans were in charge, he felt emboldened to ask for another copy—and so he had come to the Assassins’ Gate. The man, unshaven and wretched looking, began to cry. The teacher told him not to be sad, to trust in God, and to speak with the American soldiers at the checkpoint. He shuffled back into line.
“Please, sir, can you help me?” she continued. “I must work with Americans, because my psychology is demolished by Saddam Hussein. Not just me. All Iraqis. Psychological demolition.”
Our conversation was brief, and it would have been briefer if my driver and translator, both of whom thought the woman completely insane, had succeeded in pulling me away at the start. Months later I saw her again: Somehow she had landed a job translating for the American soldiers who inspected IDs and searched people entering the Green Zone through another checkpoint. She had grown fat and acquired a pair of designer sunglasses.
I seldom think about Iraq without remembering the schoolteacher standing outside the Assassins’ Gate, the abrupt intensity of her stare and speech, the sense that there was madness and truth in her all at once. That first summer after the Americans arrived, Iraq has the heightened, vivid, confused quality of a dream, washed in the relentless yellow sunlight. The hesitations and niceties of normal life dropped away. Something extraordinary was happening. No one knew what it was or how it would go, but it mattered more than anything and there wasn’t much time.
Later on I learned that I’d been wrong about the Assassins’ Gate. It wasn’t ancient; Saddam built it some years ago in grandiose imitation of Baghdad’s classical entrances. It wasn’t even the Assassins’ Gate—not to the Iraqis. The name drew blank looks from them, and then annoyance. They called it, more prosaically, Bab al-Qasr, the Palace Gate, because the road that passed under the arch led to Saddam’s Republican Palace, a mile or so away, where the occupation authority had its headquarters. “Assassins’ Gate” came from the nickname of the soldiers positioned there, who belonged to Alpha Company: A for Assassins, like “Kilory was here.” It was an American invention for an ersatz Iraqi monument, a misnomer for a mirage. Iraqis complained about the way the U.S. military renamed their highways and buildings and redrew their district lines. It reminded them that something alien and powerful had been imposed on them without their consent, and that this thing did not fit easily with the lives they’d always known, it pulled and chafed, though it had also relieved them of a terrible curse. The mesh demanded judgment and patience from both sides, and already in that first summer these were in short supply.
The name “Assassins’ Gate” stuck with the Americans in Iraq, and eventually with some of the Iraqis, too. The original assassins were twelfth-century Muslim heretics; they were said to consume hashish in gardens of earthly delights before going out to kill, and they made murder such a public spectacle that it became a form of suicide as well—the assassin set upon his target at noon Friday in the mosque with a knife, knowing he too would die. Over time in Iraq, as the violence surged, and the Assassins’ Gate disappeared behind watchtowers and concrete blast walls, and everything began to deteriorate, the name came to fit in a peculiarly evocative way. I imagined a foreign traveler walking under the glare of the sun through the front gate of an old walled city, believing that he was safe and welcome in this unfamiliar place, not knowing that hidden dangers awaited him just inside. At other times, it was the foreigner I saw as the assassin, taking aim from his perch high up on the arch.
The road that led America to the Assassins’ Gate is long and not at all direct. The story of the Iraq War is a story of ideas about the role of the United States in the world, and of the individuals who conceived and acted on them. It has roots deep in history, yet there was nothing inevitable about the war, and the mere fact of it still sometimes astounds me. During the nearly interminable buildup to war I never found the questions about it easy to answer, and the manner in which the country argued with itself seemed wholly inadequate to the scale of what we were about to get into. I first went to Iraq, and then kept going back, because I wanted to see past the abstractions to what the war meant in people’s lives. Nothing, I felt in that summer of 2003, was fixed yet. The most important struggles were the ones going on inside the minds of Iraqis and Americans alike. The war’s meaning would be the sum of all the ways that all of them understood one another and the event that had thrust them together. In the end it would come down to just these encounters, millions of them, like the one at the Assassins’ Gate.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374299633
• ISBN 13: 9780374299637
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480