The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

This is an excellent book, especially the part that covers the run up to the war. He is spot on about how the first year in Iraq was a lost year that destroyed the occupations chances to be successful. He is also spot on about how Americans treated Iraqis. Most of the time they were treated like cattle. Most American soldiers just could not or would not make the shift from war fighting to peacekeeping operations. That is the fault of leadership. Also, none of the soldiers or the personnel at the CPA had the background, training or language skills to succeed in rebuilding Iraq. It became a mind blowing cluster. I was in Fallujah and at first things were going our way. Then Paul Bremmer disbanded the Iraqi military and fired most of the civil servants. Big mistake, it enraged the Iraqis. We also did not have the people to stop the large scale looting of the military warehouses West of Baghdad. This armed the insurgency. Saddam loyalist got away with millions of tons of weaponry. We warned the command in Baghdad, but nobody listened to us. Also, Iraqis told us that many foreign fighters were coming to Fallujah and Ramadi. Again, we warned our higher command, but nobody listened or took it seriously. I was in a Civil Affairs unit and we did our best to get the police and other essential services going but we not only started to have to fight mad Iraqis, but also it seemed like we had to fight our own people to get anything done. Many American units would not work together and the military would not work with the CPA. In the end, nothing got done. I felt really sorry for the Iraqi people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed for God knows what.

A lot of ink has been spilled over Iraq during the past four years, and for good reason. With any subject so controversial and contested, there will obviously be a lot of polemical and harmful writing from both sides of the argument, but thankfully, a lot of well-informed and intelligent writing as well. With so much out there, sifting through it all can be demanding, but anyone that comes across The Assassins' Gate will have in their hands one of the true gems on the subject. If you are only going to read one book on what is currently happening in Iraq, I passionately believe that this should be the book.It's hard to tell exactly what you're going to get just by looking at the title and what's on the back cover, but I can assure you that all of the comments on the back (made by some of the most respected foreign policy critics) are dead on in their assessment. What you'll find in this book is the story of how the U.S. (again) found itself in Iraq. The beginning chapters foucs on the decision making process; who was making them and how. This is perhaps the most well-written and intelligent description of these events, and I have read more than several of them. You will gain more insight on how we got into this war from reading Packer's book than from perhaps anywhere else. He gives the reader wonderful character sketches of people like Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, and Kanan Makiya. These are the people that really had a large hand in what was happening, and by focusing on them rather than the bigger names like Bush or Rumsfeld, Packer does a much better job at explaining these events than his peers.The rest of the book deals with Packer's personal experiences in Iraq during the war. Each chapter deals with a different theme, such as the insurgency & the potential for a civil war, and while the scope of what's covered in the bulk of the book is somewhat more narrow than the first three or four chapters, Packer still gives the reader a very satisfying account of the war as a whole.This book's biggest strenght is that it blends nearly flawless political analysis with the readability of a novel. Packer is a superb writer and I found it very hard to put this book down. From an academic point of view the book is close to flawless. This in itself is very impressive, because it does not appear that Packer had much previous experience with Iraq. I've read the works of those considered to be area experts and some of them can't even hold a match to Packer's work here. This is exciting and depressing all at once.I found this book to be particularly good because it also fit perfectly with my own personal feelings about the war. As someone that wanted to see Hussein gone, I had to support the idea of removing him (and still do). But beyond that initial decision, the way the Bush administration handled the war has been negligent at best, criminal at worst. Packer has not written a polemical rant here, but by the end of his book, he lets you know that very real and harmful mistakes have been made. He occupies that well-intentioned, but pragmatic middle ground that this debate so sorely needs.This book will appeal to casual observers and serious analysts alike. While books by Diamond and Feldman that cover similar themes are also excellent and should be read, Packer's book is by far the best, and I believe that no one can claim to truly have a grasp on what's happening in Iraq unless they have read this book. We can only hope that Packer will continue to produce work of such extraordinarily high quality on this and other foreign policy issues.

Assassins' Gate is an astonishing work. This book is a rare find, Packer is a journalist who not only digs deep for the stories he tells, but is able to put them within the proper context, a feat rarely attempted and seemingly un-attempted nowadays.This book is based on the reporter's experiences meeting with the ex-pat Iraqis that lobbied for America to overthrow Hussein and the extensive amount of time he spent in Iraq after the invasion. The book has narrow objectives. It doesn't push a point a view based on the status of major metrics like the change in oil supplies or electricity to Iraqis. This book does not report much of anything regarding America's invasion of Iraq. This book is not an attempt to defend the supporters or detractors of America invading. This book does not attempt to provide a bird's eye view of the success or failure of the vast undertaking of building a democracy in Iraq.What this book does do is interweave stories about real Iraqis and the effect Hussein had on their lives, and what life is like after we brought the Baathists down. Packer also gets the perspective of the military, the bureaucrats in the Coalition trying to rebuild a country, and the local Iraqis that are working with America to rebuild Iraq. While Packer keeps his reporting down in the dirt, rather than writing from an ivory tower, one is able to come up with some strategic conclusions about how efforts have gone so far and what successes and failures Iraqis and Americans have experienced based on his anecdotal narratives. This is because Packer does such a great job of providing a large number of perspectives where he's able to capture the complex impressions of the people experiencing these times in Iraq. There are no cardboard caricatures in this book!Packer does take the liberty of providing us with his perspective on the current reality near the end of the book. I have found no writer more worthy of pushing their point of view, he earned it by spending so much time outside the green zone with Iraqis and the Americans that are the boots on the ground making the effort to increase our odds of success.If one were at a dinner party with Packer discussing the wisdom of our approach and the performance of our efforts, and partisans from both sides were also present, I believe by the end of the evening, all the non-partisans would be pretty much ignoring the ideologues to listen exclusively to what Packer learned. Problem is, it seems there are hardly any non-partisans (see pg. 383 where Packer reports on his dinner party conversations back in America).Decades and a century from now, when these events have played out more and history has lent us some perspective, I have no doubt historians will be heavily leveraging Packer's work. Packer provides perspective and the human element necessary to illuminate how the major milestones into 2005 affected the people of Iraq and the Americans present in Iraq who are making the effort to build a constitutional democracy.

I have a whole bookcase of books about the Iraq business and this is far and away the best - and that is saying something! I would agree with everything that the previous reviewer wrote, and so I won't repeat his detailed summary; suffice it to say that the story is alarming, the writing amazing, the breadth and the depth are awe-inspiring. If you have to read only one book on Iraq, make it this one. (All my friends got compulsory copies).

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