The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  The fate of exiles is to dream and wait and decay. But Makiya wasn’t decaying—he had his books, his projects. Beneath the slightly bewildered manner lay a fierce intensity and even stubbornness. Charter 91 and the Iraqi National Congress, the exiles’ political organization (Makiya was a member of its assembly), seemed unlikely to create the Republic of Tolerance. The power of Saddam and the Baath Party, like the Soviet Union once, or apartheid South Africa, at that time seemed permanent, an iron lock. The miracles of 1989 and the democratic revolutions of the 1990s were not for Iraq, which belonged to an alien and frightening part of the world where governments and people routinely did terrible things and no light or air ever penetrated. I was a little embarrassed to sit with Makiya and hear his ideas. It was awkward to be confronted with this intelligence and idealism, to sympathize with his hopes, and have nothing to offer in return, not even hope. But he kept Iraq from being a complete abstraction. If not for Kanan Makiya and our irregular coffees, its future would never have crossed my mind.

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  DURING THE YEARS between the Gulf War and September 11, Iraq was rarely on the front page of newspapers. But another story was playing out, subtler but no less important than war: the development of certain ideas about America and its mission in the world. The Iraq War started as a war of ideas, and to understand how and why America came to be in Iraq, one has to trace their origins.

  On March 8, 1992—almost a year to the day after Kanan Makiya came out of pseudonymity to urge the overthrow of Saddam’s regime—The New York Times published selections from the draft of a document that had been leaked by an apparently dismayed official in President Bush’s Pentagon. The document, forty-six pages long, was called the Defense Planning Guidance, a policy statement that outlined America’s political and military strategy after the Cold War. It was written by Zalmay Khalilzad and Abram Shulsky, both of whom would become second-tier players in the Iraq War under the second President Bush. The Defense Planning Guidance was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and overseen by the undersecretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz. Its intellectual ambition confirmed Wolfowitz’s reputation as a big thinker.

  “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” the draft declared at the outset. The United States would preserve its preeminent power across the globe and discourage potential competitors by keeping defense spending at high levels. Those competitors were as likely to emerge in Europe as anywhere, in spite of America’s longstanding alliances with the Western democracies. Germany and Japan came in for special suspicion. “Like the coalition that opposed Iraqi aggression,” the authors wrote, “we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted.” There was no mention of the United Nations or any other international organization. Instead, the document described a world of dangers and power struggles in which America had to remain the superpower, for its own security and for stability everywhere else.

  The Defense Planning Guidance was one of those internal bureaucratic memoranda—like the famous NSC-68 paper of 1950 outlining an aggressive Cold War strategy—that foretell a grand historic shift. After the leak was published in The New York Times, President Bush at first disputed that the implications were far-reaching at all, then he ordered Pentagon officials to rewrite it. When the document was released in May, the language about preeminence was gone; the toned-down revision made reassuring noises about cooperation and alliances. The press played the story as a case of the mature, sober Defense Secretary Dick Cheney reining in the rambunctious thinking of Undersecretary Wolfowitz. In hindsight, this account seems unlikely. With its language about American dominance, ad hoc coalitions, and preemptive war to prevent threats from unconventional weapons, the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992 foreshadows with uncanny accuracy, down to the wording of key sentences, the second President Bush’s National Security Strategy of 2002, which poured the foundation for what came to be called the Bush Doctrine, and its first test, the Iraq War. And this second document reflected, as much as anyone else’s, the ideas of Vice President Cheney.

  The DPG was a barely visible hairline fracture that over time developed into a profound break. That the leaked document was cleaned up for public presentation wasn’t just a response to poor early reviews. Between its authors and the president they served lay a philosophical gulf too vast for the editing out of a few phrases to close. Bush the father belonged to the Nixon-Kissinger school of political thought. In the jargon of foreign policy, he was a “realist,” which meant that he believed in preserving the balance of power between states that acted out of narrowly defined interests. For realists, the key phrase was “vital national interest.” To officials of this persuasion, the fall of the Soviet Union wasn’t an occasion for America to expand its military dominance across the face of the earth. It was a cause for concern, because it upset the balance of power. One realist even wrote an article titled “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War.” The mainstream of the Republican Party was dedicated to this line of thought, and after the Cold War its leaders seemed uncertain about what course to pursue—especially once Bill Clinton defeated George Bush. With a Democrat in the White House, Republican wise men began to call for American retrenchment around the world. They disliked the new president’s forays into the margins of geopolitics like Haiti and the Balkans. They especially disliked the talk of human rights and democracy as causes for expending blood and treasure abroad. To the realists, these were dangerous fantasies. What foreign regimes did to their own citizens within the privacy of their own borders was no business of the United States.

  During the presidency of Bill Clinton, this view pushed the Republican Party close to its old isolationism of the years before Pearl Harbor. But throughout the 1990s, another current of thought ran alongside or beneath this mainstream, quietly at first, later gathering force.

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  THE IRAQ WAR will always be linked with the term “neoconservative.” The connection is so tight that we’ve forgotten the history of the word. Neoconservatives have been around since the late sixties, when a small group of liberal intellectuals, many of them originating in the left-wing sects of the 1930s, watched the era of Vietnam, black power, and student revolution unfold. They watched in horror, and while other liberals were turning dovish or radical, they moved sharply to the right. One of them defined a neoconservative as a liberal who’s been mugged by reality. The great foreign-policy concern of the first-generation neoconservatives—Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan—was the same concern of the Truman-Acheson generation of liberals: communism. The disaster in Vietnam did not teach them the lesson that America had tragically overreached and needed to learn the limits of its power. They concluded instead that America had gone wobbly. Our unwillingness to fight, they argued, only encouraged the Soviet Union to expand, until half the globe or more would fall under communist rule. As the seventies stumbled along—the SALT talks, détente, the fall of Saigon with the humiliating evacuation off the American embassy roof, the Iranian revolution, the hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the insurgencies in Central America—their alarm reached a dire pitch. In the pages of Commentary magazine, and in the statements released by their group, the Committee on the Present Danger, the neoconservatives warned that American power had grown provocatively weak. Accommodating the Soviet Empire was a sign of defeatism, not realism. The tone of these warnings was righteous and apocalyptic, laced with anger at soft-headed liberals (many of them former friends and colleagues of the neoconservatives) who’d lost their nerve in the ’60s. The tone was personal and, in a sense, natural; it owed something to the left-wing version of world-historical struggle on which so many neoconservatives had nursed in their early years.

  In their grim worldview, there wasn’t much room for human rights outside the Soviet bloc—especially when President Carter put talk of human rights at the center of his foreign poli
cy. This talk seemed to the neoconservatives truly dangerous, for it undermined friendly regimes (Nicaragua, South Africa, Iran) whose behavior we might not like (they were corrupt, they tortured and killed their own citizens) but whose survival was essential for the resistance to communism. In 1979, one of the neoconservatives, Jeane Kirkpatrick, published an essay in Commentary, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” arguing that the tendency of human-rights do-gooders to undermine America’s friends and leave the way open to our enemies turned both grand strategy and morality on their heads. Our friends might be nasty, but our enemies were worse; the difference between them was the difference between benign and malignant cancer. It was America’s mission to prevent authoritarian friends from becoming totalitarian enemies, which by their essence locked whole populations in eternal prisons that could never be opened from the inside. The essay caught Reagan’s eye and the following year won Kirkpatrick an appointment as UN ambassador under the newly elected president.

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  IN REAGAN the neoconservatives found their champion. His election and his administration’s policies, which were partly inspired by the ideas of men like Podhoretz and Kristol, showed the neoconservatives that ideas could lead to power, and that power required ideas. This was not a lesson that came naturally. Their earlier lives in left-wing sects in the 1930s and ’40s had been studies in political futility, all the more intense for their impotence, carried on as if New York was St. Petersburg and Toledo Kiev, and America itself on the verge of its own dialectical orgasm of revolution. But these fights at least taught the participants to take themselves and their ideas very seriously, to treat intellectual combat as an extension of the political and even the weaponized kind. In 1980, the long training of their younger years paid off.

  To the neoconservatives’ ideas about American power Reagan added a quality of his own: a benign disposition. This wasn’t a mere quirk of temperament. Reagan’s character, his comfort with the plain American idiom of optimism, gave the confrontational worldview a smiling face that suggested something higher than grim combat. American power, Reagan said, was a force for good in the world—this at a time when respectable opinion, in America and elsewhere, was still riveted by the memory of napalm igniting the jungles of South Vietnam. In 1976, Reagan won a fight at the Republican convention against the establishment forces of President Ford and his cold-blooded secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to put a “morality in foreign policy” plank in the party’s platform. To large numbers of Americans, including Republicans, morality in foreign policy meant minding our own business. At best it meant speaking up for dissidents in the Soviet Union or Chile. Reagan meant something far grander: confronting and defeating communism all over the world. And though he lost the nomination battle to Ford in 1976, he won the war for his party’s soul.

  In 1981, the first year of Reagan’s presidency, Elliott Abrams, who was Reagan’s aggressive assistant secretary of state for Latin America and, later, human rights, wrote a memo arguing that the administration shouldn’t simply oppose communism; it should also promote democracy, in communist and noncommunist countries alike. The memo contradicted the harsher view expressed two years before by Jeane Kirkpatrick in the magazine edited by Abrams’s father-in-law, Norman Podhoretz. Out of personal inclination as well as strategic calculation, Reagan in his rhetoric embraced the idea of promoting democracy. In 1982, speaking before the British parliament at Westminster, he presented a vision of democracy expanding across the globe. The words inspired a new generation of young officials orbiting around Reagan’s sun.

  One of them was Robert Kagan. The son of a Yale professor of Greek history, Kagan is about the same age as I, but we learned the opposite lesson from the historical moment of our early years: After Vietnam, I (and everyone I knew) feared American overreach; Kagan (and the new generation of conservatives) feared American drift. “When I was in college in the late seventies, I remember all of us thinking that those hippie antiwar guys who came before us were a little ridiculous,” Kagan said when we met in Washington in early 2004. “That somehow wasn’t the way to be. I came of age really after Vietnam. The seventies were my formative experience in the broadest sense, because then it was all—at least as far as I saw—American weakness, leading to these catastrophes: Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua. Just the weakness and the embarrassment of Jimmy Carter.”

  So in his twenties Kagan became a soldier in the Reagan revolution. He first wrote speeches for Secretary of State George Shultz, then helped to develop Nicaragua policy under Elliott Abrams. But in the small proxy fights of the late Cold War, the choice was between two kinds of armed ugliness. The Nicaraguan contras made unconvincing founding fathers; and when the Salvadoran military agreed to hold an election in 1983, the Reagan administration played a double game—midwifing the democratic process and ensuring victory for our man in San Salvador, José Napoleon Duarte. Despite his close involvement in the Nicaragua policy, Kagan emerged unscathed from the Iran-contra scandal that tainted Abrams with a perjury conviction (he was later pardoned by the first President Bush). In practice, morality in foreign policy looked less inspiring than the shining city on the hill. The Reagan administration’s policy on Iraq was no different from Henry Kissinger’s: to support the Baathist regime in the name of the national interest, even when the regime was committing genocide against the Kurds.

  Still, the idea and the language took hold in the minds of younger thinkers like Kagan: Anticommunism was only half a worldview; the other half was democratic idealism, a faith in the transformational power of American values. At the end of the decade, after Reagan left office, communism collapsed in Europe; the following year, in 1990, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas lost power in a democratic election; and in 1991, Kagan watched the demise of the Soviet Union up close in Moscow, where his wife was stationed as a diplomat. All of this confirmed for the Reaganites that history was on their side. But the Cold War was over, and most of them no longer knew how to think about America and the world, and the neoconservatives started to drift.

  A few years later, in the relative silence and obscurity of the Clinton era, Kagan began to publish a series of articles that outlined a vision for post–Cold War foreign policy. They appeared in Commentary, the house organ of neoconservatism. But by the mid-1990s the tone and some of the content had changed. Kagan, the ideological son of Reagan, was shaped by the experience in Nicaragua (which, in his book A Twilight Struggle, he described as a great success for Reagan’s foreign policy) and the fall of communism—not by Vietnam. He was a man of the ’80s, not the ’60s; his tone was affirmation, not warning. In our conversation, Kagan brushed aside the term “neoconservative,” and when I asked whether he ever wondered if he was a liberal, he shot back, “I am a liberal. In foreign policy I’m a liberal. The conservative tradition in foreign policy is the minimalist, realist tradition.” The liberal tradition, in Kagan’s genealogy, has upheld an activist foreign policy that reflects American ideals as well as interests, and it runs from Hamilton through John Quincy Adams, Lincoln (the Civil War was a pivotal case, as the Union embraced a liberal “foreign policy” toward slavery in the South), Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and ultimately to Reagan.

  The real target of Kagan’s Commentary articles, published between 1994 and 1997, was the Republican Party. He regarded with dismay the party’s turn away from activism in foreign policy after the end of the Soviet Union. One by one, he watched his idealistic comrades from the Reagan years drop their former commitment to global democracy under the pressure of partisan politics or changed world circumstances or their own shifting views—until the only one left standing to support, for example, the invasion of Haiti on behalf of its elected government, was Robert Kagan. Everywhere he looked, both in the administration of the first Bush and in the congressional opposition to Bill Clinton, Republicans were in tired retreat. Interventions in messy little wars like Bosnia’s would lead to quagmire, warned such foreign-policy titans as Senator John McCain, so
unding like a liberal Democrat still recovering from the trauma of Vietnam (rather than a war hero for whom the trauma was not at all figurative). Without Reagan and the Soviet Union to focus its mind, the party had wandered back into cautious realism. Its wise men warned about “imperial overstretch” and invoked that indispensable phrase from the Nixon-Kissinger years, “vital national interest.” So much for morality in foreign policy. If Yugoslavs and Rwandans were determined to slaughter one another, if Somalia was plunging into chaos while its people starved, these unhappy events were probably outside our power to remedy and certainly outside our concern.

  Against this timidity Kagan launched a powerful analytical attack. The end of the Cold War, he argued, was precisely the moment not to withdraw but to extend. America shouldn’t mourn the loss of a balance of power but instead use its unrivaled power all around the world to pursue its interests and its values—which almost always go together. No corner of the earth is too distant or obscure to be allowed to fester dangerously or be deprived of the benevolent effects of American hegemony, namely democracy and a stable peace. Seeking to revive the spirit of Reagan, Kagan reached farther back to Theodore Roosevelt and “the idea that the American people should take a hand in shaping mankind’s destiny, that playing such a role accords honor, and that the right to such honor must be earned.” For Kagan, the extension of democracy around the world was as much about America’s national destiny as it was about doing good things for unhappy people in foreign countries. The values might be universal, but only one country could secure them. Kagan was expressing a kind of nationalism, not so different in ambition from the British nationalism of Kipling’s white man’s burden (without the racial baggage), the French mission civilisatrice (without the religious baggage), and the antique Pax Romana (without an actual empire).