The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  There was nothing unusual about a classicist dining with the Bush administration. A number of neoconservatives—Wolfowitz was the most prominent, but there were many others in policy-making positions under Bush and, earlier, Reagan—had been students of Leo Strauss, or of his disciple, Allan Bloom. Strauss emigrated from Germany in the early thirties and ended up at the University of Chicago, teaching Plato, Xenophon, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Nietzsche to two decades of enthralled young Americans. Strauss’s intellectual project was to call into question the complacent materialism and secularism of the modern West and to send his students back for deeper wisdom to close readings of classical political works, starting with the Greeks. His pedagogical intensity and disenchantment with what he saw as the relativism, even nihilism, of liberal thought turned several generations of students, already disposed by the upheavals of the sixties and seventies to a sort of cultural pessimism, into members of the Strauss cult.

  I ran into it as a freshman at Yale in the late seventies. In the classrooms of young Straussian professors, with their awkward social manners and pale cryptic smiles, one had the sense of a secret body of understanding to which only a select few would be admitted. They taught the classics in translations by their own (Bloom’s version of Plato’s Republic, for instance) because the correct wording of key ideas revealed hidden meanings—the art of concealment that was the subject of Strauss’s 1952 book Persecution and the Art of Writing. The classical thinkers wrote in an esoteric vein, Strauss argued, on different levels—an untrammeled inquiry into truth available to the wisest readers, a more careful and responsible discourse for the broad public—because philosophy is dangerous to authority and, ultimately, to the philosopher himself, as Socrates found out. Strauss wanted to rescue philosophy from the comfortable mediocrity of the Enlightenment. He reopened questions about truth, politics, and the soul that seemed to have been settled by rational science long before the twentieth century. In this country, Strauss’s zealous followers seized and distorted his teachings, ironing out every irony in pursuing their rigidly virtuous and peculiarly American crusade against the malaise of the modern world, which was nowhere more corrupt than in the university itself. At Yale, these disciples—almost exclusively male—wore bow ties and joined clubs with aristocratic-sounding names and generally cultivated an air of special knowledge and “excellence.”

  In 1981, one of the Yale Straussians, Charles Fairbanks, was hired by Wolfowitz to work on the Reagan State Department’s policy planning staff. Over the next two decades, as they and the American university found each other increasingly uncongenial, Straussians and their influence shifted to Washington and spread throughout the archipelago of conservative publications, advocacy groups, think tanks, and foundations. With the congressional Republican ascendancy and the election of George W. Bush, Straussianism (and, more broadly, neoconservatism) became the unlikely intellectual spinal cord of the party in power. A European-produced, deliberately elitist, twilit view of the modern world was somehow wedded to the sunny all-American politics of triumphal capitalism, cultural piety, and flag-waving nationalism, under the most anti-intellectual president since at least Warren G. Harding. America is Sodom, and America is the light of the world—the last hope for the ancient idea of natural right. Mark Lilla, a professor in the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where Strauss once taught, observed, “How these eschatological and apocalyptic ideas about America can exist in the same breast, without some effort at reconciliation, remains a mystery to every outsider who glances at a neo-conservative magazine today. They appeal, though, to political Straussians, whose hearts beat arhythmically to both Sousa and Wagner.” Neoconservative events in Washington took on the aspect of a carnival freak show, where, Lilla went on dryly, among “older New York intellectuals, professors in exile from politically correct universities, economic visionaries, Teddy Roosevelt enthusiasts, home-schooling advocates, evangelical Protestants, Latin-mass Catholics, Likudniks, and personalities from shock radio,” there were always Straussians standing around who “will explain to you the logical connection between ancient philosophy and the latest press release from the American Enterprise Institute. It would take a comic genius, an American Aristophanes, to capture the strangeness of this little world.”

  Interviewed by a journalist a month after the fall of Baghdad, Strauss’s former student Paul Wolfowitz scoffed at the notion of a Straussian connection to the Iraq War. “It’s a product of fevered minds,” he said. “I mean, I took two terrific courses from Leo Strauss as a graduate student. The idea that this has anything to do with U.S. foreign policy is just laughable.”

  Much abused by his disciples and their critics alike, Leo Strauss, who was born in 1899 and died in 1973, can’t be held responsible for the invasion of Iraq. The neoconservatives don’t meet secretly after hours in the Pentagon’s E-ring or the offices of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to pore over heavily underlined copies of Natural Right and History looking for guidance on overthrowing Saddam. There is no Straussian conspiracy. “People in Washington don’t read books,” Richard Perle said.

  But the neoconservatives, whether inside government or outside, do possess shared mental habits, with far-reaching consequences in the real world. These fevered minds are united in boldness and certainty. Surrounded by their invertebrate enemies in the deep decay of American institutions—the universities, the media, the bureaucracies, the courts—they cradle a truth that no one else has the courage or vision to see. They conceive of themselves as insurgents, warring against an exhausted liberal establishment that doesn’t have the moral clarity to defend itself, let alone the country—that has no principles left to defend. They are the vanguard of democracy.

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  BUT ISN’T A “VANGUARD” historically associated with the left? Isn’t it the core leadership of a revolution?

  In fact, the advocates of war—many of them—vaguely resembled the vanguardists of earlier struggles. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was known as Dany the Red in May 1968 when he was a youthful leader of the student revolution in Paris and has since become a member of the European parliament, debated Richard Perle a few weeks before the invasion. Dany the Red told the Prince of Darkness, “Your government has been behaving like the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. You want to change the whole world!” It’s possible to imagine that Perle enjoyed the comparison. An apocalyptic cast of mind, and the desire of a small group in possession of a big idea to push history in a dramatically new direction, belongs exclusively to neither the left nor the right. Often, it’s a characteristic of individuals who migrate from one flock to the other without pausing to graze on tasteless facts under the dull sky of moderation. The original neoconservatives had once been leftists themselves—not ordinary Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy liberals, but Trotskyists, Lovestoneites, Schachtmanites, and other exotica of the hothouse world of New York intellectuals in the 1930s and ’40s. Christopher Hitchens, the British polemicist, told me, “That crowd, the neocon group, somewhere in their cortex is the name of Leon Trotsky. If I were to say ‘Kronstadt’ to Trent Lott, I don’t think I’d get a whole hell of a lot for my trouble,” Hitchens said, referring to the 1921 mutiny of Russian sailors that was put down by Trotsky’s forces. “But if I were to say ‘Kronstadt’ to Paul Wolfowitz, I think he would more than know what I was talking about.”

  Perhaps this explains why several of the most prominent Iraq hawks came from the left. Most prominent of all was Hitchens himself. After the terror attacks, he broke with comrades such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, jettisoned his long-standing column at The Nation magazine, became a vocal Bush supporter, and heartily girded himself for battle with what he called “Islamo-fascism.”

  Hitchens could be as gracious and thoughtful in private as he was scathingly contemptuous in public and in print. When I sat down with him for lunch near his apartment in Washington in late 2002—an expensive, all-afternoon business—he seemed to have redi
scovered his youth in the New Left. The Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi had taken the place of the revolutionary socialist movement, and Hitchens relished the coming war. “I feel much more like I used to in the sixties,” he said, “working with revolutionaries. That’s what I’m doing, I’m helping a very desperate underground. That reminds me of my better days quite poignantly. Waving a banner with Saddam Hussein’s slogans on it, namely, ‘No War on Iraq,’ which confuses Iraq with Saddam, which is what he wants—that’s not revolutionary politics to me.”

  An American-led overthrow of Saddam would be “revolution from above”—a phrase coined by none other than Leon Trotsky, to describe Stalin’s concentration of power in the hands of the Communist Central Committee. Trotsky meant it ironically; I was fairly certain that Hitchens did not. All the rhetorical firepower he had once directed at the conservative foreign-policy establishment he now turned on Islamists and antiwar leftists. He brandished his disdain for religion like a gun, especially toward the belligerent faith of the jihadis. “You want to be a martyr?” Hitchens blustered. “I’m here to help.”

  This militant secularist now found himself brother-in-arms with evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews, on behalf of liberal democracy in the Arab-Muslim world. Having spent most of his life attacking American foreign policy, Hitchens had come to the conclusion that “after the dust settles, the only revolution left standing is the American one. Americanization is the most revolutionary force in the world. There’s almost no country where adopting the Americans wouldn’t be the most radical thing they could do. I’ve always been a Paine-ite.” Hitchens looked forward to drinking champagne in Baghdad with his Iraqi comrades by Valentine’s Day 2003.

  Believers on both the right and left were proposing one of the most audacious turns in the history of American foreign policy: to establish, by force of arms, “a beachhead of Arab democracy in the Middle East,” as Paul Berman called it. To put an American political and military stamp, with a friendly government and permanent bases, in the heart of the region where al-Qaeda drew most of its recruits. To bring the ballot box and the public-affairs program to decaying sunbaked cities and tribal deserts. (How banal the ultimate goal of all this ardor!) The whole appeal of the idea lay in its audacity. It would, with one violent push, shove history out of a deep hole. By a chain reaction, a reverse domino effect, war in Iraq would weaken the Middle East’s dictatorships and undermine its murderous ideologies and begin to spread the balm of liberal democracy. The road to Jerusalem, Riyadh, Damascus, and Tehran went through Baghdad. To persist with caution toward the sick, dangerous status quo of the Middle East would be contemptible, almost unbearable. Who wouldn’t choose amputation over gangrene? With will and imagination, America could strike one great blow at terrorism, tyranny, underdevelopment, and the region’s hardest, saddest problem.

  Ideas as big as this attract strange bedfellows. The pairings both for and against grew so weirdly promiscuous that it was less useful to think in terms of left and right than of interventionists and anti-interventionists, or revolutionaries and realists. Old-fashioned realists from the Republican establishment found themselves on the same side of the debate as anti-imperialist leftists and far-right isolationists, while liberal veterans of humanitarian war became uneasy allies of administration hawks. Brent Scowcroft was tangled up with Gore Vidal and Pat Buchanan; Michael Ignatieff woke up next to Paul Wolfowitz. Berman wondered whether he and the believers in the administration even wanted the same thing. “I’m not sure we’re speaking the same language because I don’t know how to judge the language of the neoconservatives,” he said one night at his apartment. “If the language is sincere, and there is an idealism among the neocons that echoes and reflects in some way the language of the liberal interventionists of the nineties, well, that would be a good thing. It’s true that neoconservatism had a left-wing origin, and were it to turn out to be the case—which I’m extremely skeptical about—that some of the neocons would return to their earliest intellectual roots, that would be excellent.” But if this warplane ever took off, “liberal interventionists of the nineties” would not be at the controls. So the administration’s intentions mattered greatly. “It’s extremely hard to judge what the people in the administration really do think,” Berman said. “On what points are they sincere? On what points are they hypocritical? They haven’t allowed us to be able to tell.”

  But the administration’s sincerity wasn’t even the biggest question. There was also the question of its knowledge and judgment. The prowar lobby’s supreme impatience with things as they are disturbed even some supporters. If the war against radical Islamism must ultimately also be a war for liberalism, the West’s own history should be taken as cautionary. Liberalism didn’t suddenly appear “one scorching July day in France in 1789,” Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the prowar New Republic, told me. It was a “violent rupture” after centuries of conflict within Western theocracy and autocracy. Liberalism is, by definition, difficult and destabilizing. It shouldn’t be undertaken with missionary zeal. The attempt to bring it to the theocratic and autocratic Middle East from outside, by force, on the simple faith that people everywhere long to be free, end of story—this was a profoundly unliberal idea. “If there’s one thing that liberalism has no time for, it’s an eschatological view,” Wieseltier said. “Liberalism is an essentially anti-eschatological view of the world. And now that various people have woken up to the rough political and philosophical realities of most of the world, the idea that the United States must send its troops everywhere to fix the world once and for all is stupid. They want a final answer. They want it over. And there is no final answer. There’s slow, steady, fitful progress toward a more decent and democratic world.” Nonetheless, Wieseltier supported a war, on the only grounds the administration gave for waging it: the threat from Saddam’s arsenal of unconventional weapons and his history of using them.

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  THROUGHOUT 2002, those officials who were actually charged with making policy on Iraq were not talking about liberal civilization or revolution from above. It wasn’t at all clear that Bush’s inner circle shared the dreams and visions of war intellectuals outside government. The basis for war—the casus belli—was clearly and narrowly defined by the Bush administration, beginning with the president’s own warning in his State of the Union address: “The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” If there was to be war, the reasons would be syllogistic, not eschatological: Saddam has had and still seeks weapons of mass destruction; he has used them on his own citizens in the past; he might now give them to al-Qaeda or another terrorist group; terrorists want to destroy the United States. Therefore, the United States must disarm or overthrow Saddam.

  The president’s “axis of evil” speech, coming just weeks after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, signaled the next stage in the war on terrorism and the basis for further action. The speech dramatically expanded the theater of the war, but it did so on relatively narrow grounds. As Wolfowitz told an interviewer after the fall of Baghdad, WMD was the least common denominator: “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.” Wolfowitz suggested that he himself had bigger ideas—a realignment of American power and influence in the Middle East, away from theocratic Saudi Arabia (home to so many of the 9/11 hijackers), and toward a democratic Iraq, as the beginning of an effort to cleanse the whole region of murderous regimes and ideologies. This would have been a much broader case for war than WMD and closer to the arguments of influential people outside the administration, such as Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, and Robert Kagan. Resting on a complex and abstract theory, it would also have been much harder to sell to the public.

  Throughout the year, WMD remained the administration’s rationale for a war it had in all like
lihood decided upon as early as November 2001. (There was a recurring locution that expressed the diplomatic doublespeak of the prewar period and that officials continued to use up to the very brink of invasion, as if the administration were being dragged against its will into hostilities with Iraq that it was doing everything possible to avoid: “If or when war becomes necessary…”) Having settled on WMD as the cause for war—if or when there was to be a war—the administration was stuck with the limits of its own argument. In July 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, Britian’s head of foreign intelligence, reported back to Tony Blair and his top officials about meetings in Washington. According to a secret memo made public in May 2005, Sir Richard told his colleagues: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

  So when, in the late summer and fall of 2002, a high-profile campaign to convince the American public of the need for a preemptive war against Iraq began, the rhetoric had the quality of protesting too much. 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. In late August, Dick Cheney surprised Colin Powell and other Iraq skeptics when he declared before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that the Saddam Hussein regime without a doubt possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had “reconstituted” its nuclear weapons program. Within a year, Saddam could possess a nuke—and Cheney wasn’t shy about suggesting that the Iraqi dictator might well hand one over to al-Qaeda.