The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  It didn’t matter that there was no strong evidence to back up the doomsday prognosis. A possible medium- to long-term threat had become a “grave and gathering danger.” Condoleezza Rice came up with an ominous metaphor, and Bush used it in a warlike speech in Cincinnati in October: the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The campaign of persuasion proceeded by rhetorical hyperbole, by the deliberate slanting of ambiguous facts in one direction, and by a wink-and-nod suggestion that the administration knew more than it could reveal. Conflicting and inconclusive intelligence about Saddam’s weapons programs was selected and highlighted for the worst-case analysis favored by the White House. A shipment of aluminum tubes that experts in the Department of Energy doubted could be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium were, Condoleezza Rice asserted in a television interview, suitable for nothing else. Documents recording the sale of yellowcake uranium from Niger to Iraq kept being cited by top officials, including the president, long after they had been discredited as fraudulent. A group of civilians at the Pentagon under the direction of Douglas Feith and William Luti was culling through raw data on Saddam’s possible ties to al-Qaeda in order to produce the desired result that the established intelligence community, including the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, would not provide. Outside the government, war advocates like Perle, Kristol, and Kagan warned that time was running out. It was as if the administration were working around the clock to head off a nuclear Pearl Harbor and simultaneously prove that it was about to happen. One didn’t need special expertise in the fields of intelligence or proliferation to smell something wrong. The administration had boxed itself in by deciding to go to war before it knew exactly why.

  Even as Bush and his war cabinet made their particular case on Iraq, they laid out a far-reaching grand strategy for the use of American power in the world. The president began to articulate it in a series of speeches to the military academies. Rice codified it in a document prepared under her supervision and titled “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” The first draft, written by Richard Haass, was too long and mild for Rice’s taste, and she turned over the revision to Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor who had been her colleague on the NSC under the first President Bush. Zelikow produced a short, eloquent statement of principles with a new passage on preemptive war, which, when the document was released in September, was immediately taken as a justification for war with Iraq. It was as if that earlier and almost forgotten bureaucratic document, the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted near the end of the administration of the first President Bush, had been put in a deep freeze for safekeeping during the long exile of the Clinton years, to be restored to life a decade later after September 11 in the second Bush presidency by some of the same players who had written, directed, and approved the original. The new document announced a new Bush Doctrine. This doctrine promised “a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests.” It would seek to promote “a balance of power that favors human freedom.” Bush and his national security adviser Rice seemed to be splitting the difference between the realism of Bush’s father and his national security adviser, Rice’s mentor Brent Scowcroft, and the idealism of the neoconservatives who were now ascendant. But in fact, the new document’s high-flown language and, even more, its substance marked a decisive break with the foreign-policy establishment. The “balance of power” was out; in the new era, the old Cold War policies of containment and deterrence no longer applied. Rogue states and global terrorists could not be deterred. America, preeminent and without rivals, would ensure the peace in part by preempting threats to peace. It would do so within the existing international framework if possible but with ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” if necessary, or even alone. American might did not make America right; America was right by virtue of being America. But American might would uphold the right across the globe. And this is where the new post–September 11 strategy differed from the old post–Cold War strategy of the Defense Planning Guidance: After the terror attacks, the world’s superpower could no longer be neutral toward the politics practiced inside other countries, where “stability” might actually be a dangerously advanced form of decay. America would now actively promote freedom around the world. “Freedom” was the key word of the 2002 document, whose opening lines are these: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”

  In its long struggle for the soul of the Republican Party and American foreign policy, neoconservatism had finally triumphed. The first chance to test the creed was coming up fast, in Iraq.

  The worm in the apple, the seed of future trouble, is easier to see in retrospect. The leading figures of the Bush war cabinet had all worked at high levels in at least one previous administration; some of them had served in three or four. No Democratic contemporary could claim anything like their experience. Counting his years in Congress, Dick Cheney had been an influential insider under every Republican president since Nixon. Except for the Clinton years, Paul Wolfowitz’s career in government extended through every administration from Nixon to the second Bush. George W. Bush’s foreign-policy advisers were vastly experienced, they were aggressively self-confident, and they were peculiarly unsuited to deal with the consequences of the Bush Doctrine.

  They entered government in the aftermath of the trauma in Vietnam, and they were forged as Cold War hawks. They devoted their careers to restoring American military power and its projection around the world. Through the three decades of their public lives, the only thing America had to fear was its own return to weakness. But after the Cold War ended, they sat out the debates of the 1990s about humanitarian war, international standards, nation building, democracy promotion. They had little to say about the new, borderless security threats—failed states, ethnic conflict, poverty, “loose nukes” in post-communist Russia, and global terrorism. Clinton’s foreign policy was feckless; once they got back into power, they told themselves, they would do everything differently. Cheney, the hardest of hard-liners, expressed contemptuous disapproval of every intervention of the decade. Rumsfeld hadn’t formed a new idea since opposing arms control as Gerald Ford’s secretary of defense. Powell and Rice were deep skeptics of open-ended military commitments on behalf of “soft” ideals. Bush himself came into office with no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests. Wolfowitz alone among them supported the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, but his worldview left even him unprepared to deal with or even to acknowledge a stateless organization with an ideology of global jihad. When September 11 forced the imagination to grapple with something radically new, the president’s foreign-policy advisers reached for what they had always known. The threat, as they saw it, lay in well-armed enemy states. The answer, as ever, was military power and the will to use it.

  3

  EXILES

  IN APRIL 2002, with the Pentagon already deep into planning for a war, the State Department realized that it had better start thinking about a postwar. The department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs recruited Iraqi exiles with expertise in various fields and organized them into seventeen committees that would draft reports on subjects of importance for administering Iraq after Saddam—technical reports on topics like electricity, health, transitional justice, and policing. Among those Iraqis whom State invited to participate in its Future of Iraq Project was Kanan Makiya. But Makiya declined.

  He had been publicly advocating the overthrow of Saddam ever since shedding his pseudonym at the end of the Gulf War in March 1991, but Makiya distrusted the State Department’s whole approach to the question. In his view, the department’s officials, and especially the Arabists at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affai
rs, were bulwarks of the Middle Eastern status quo—the kind of bureaucrats who had always favored leaving Saddam in charge of Iraq for the sake of “stability.” They were compromised by their accommodation with the Sunni Arab dictators of the Middle East, Makiya thought, and disbelievers in the possibility of Arab democracy. In the sinister new light of September 11, they were part of the problem. Now that regime change in Iraq was not just official American policy but the focus of intense pressure and planning in Washington, Makiya worried that State—and the ideologically sympathetic CIA—would try to guide the policy toward “a Musharraf-like figure, a reformist-minded, Western-orientated, military-type figure,” in the mold of the Pakistani general who had seized power in 1999. In other words, a friendly strongman—not democracy. Makiya wanted no part of that kind of regime change. He particularly distrusted the “facilitator” of the Future of Iraq Project, a bureau official named Thomas Warrick. At a meeting in Detroit, Makiya heard Warrick singing the praises of an Iraqi ex-general who had compared democracy to a well-functioning army.

  “Some people are talking about democratic change,” Makiya told me late that year, referring to the neoconservatives at the Pentagon and the vice president’s office, who ardently supported Makiya’s friend Ahmad Chalabi, the State Department’s bête noire. “But they’re only some people, and there are other people who think that’s all a pile of garbage, that that’s nonsense. They really are out there. They’re in the State Department and they’re in the CIA today. They are very powerful players.”

  The Future of Iraq Project’s various workshops began to meet in July. In early August, Makiya took his family camping outside Washington, D.C. At some point he found time to venture from the campsite to the capital, where he met with State Department officials, including the head of the Iraq desk at Near Eastern Affairs, a veteran foreign service officer named Ryan Crocker. Makiya found that the rhetoric had changed; the officials were now talking about democracy in Iraq. Would Makiya reconsider?

  He decided to call their bluff. “I was trying to hoist them on their own petard,” he explained later, “and get something out of this that I could then use to pin the U.S. government with.” Makiya agreed to join the project’s Democratic Principles Working Group, and he suggested putting the group’s final report up for consideration at a planned conference of the Iraqi opposition in exile. The Americans readily agreed. There were thirty-two Iraqis on the committee, most of them sent as representatives of the various exile political parties and groupings. “Some of them were political hacks,” Makiya said, adding that this suited the State Department, which wanted an inoffensive document that would make no hard choices and offend no one. “I hated writing this in committee. I’m not a politician really. I’m going to do these things, say these things that other people think don’t get said, and let it be, let the chips fall where they are. That’s what the Iraqis who support me like me for, and that’s in my nature, that’s what all my books in one sense or another are about. I’m not going to stop doing that. But it’ll never make me a politician truly, for this very reason.”

  Makiya wasn’t particularly interested in the opinions of most of the committee’s other members; the word “inclusive” got on his nerves. As one of the State Department’s American advisers on the project put it, in bland officialspeak, “Makiya did not pay heed to standard protocols for working in committee.” Instead, he and two close friends and colleagues—Rend Rahim, director of the Washington-based Iraq Foundation, and Salem Chalabi, a London lawyer and nephew of the Iraqi National Congress chairman—essentially left the others out and took over the writing of the report, all the while fending off pressure from the State Department to produce something politically neutral. The small group labored through the fall to draft a detailed blueprint for Iraq’s transformation from totalitarianism to democracy. Makiya wasn’t after the kind of document that could be produced by committee.

  “It’s the architect in me,” he said, nursing a cold over Japanese tea in Cambridge in early December. A decade earlier, Makiya had confessed, “Architects are such megalomaniacs.”

  * * *

  IT WAS ALSO THE EX-TROTSKYIST in him. For somewhere in the cortex of Kanan Makiya—not deeply buried, either—was the name of Leon Trotsky, and alongside it the Trotskyist idea of an intellectual vanguard leading from the front, forcing history to move in the desired direction. Makiya left Baghdad in 1967 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the summer after his freshman year the most extreme faction of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, with an ideology that demanded the total dissolution of individual identity into the collective “Arabness” of the state, an ideology that the Baathists themselves described as a form of love, came to power in a coup—probably the least noticed and soonest forgotten of 1968’s many utopian events. Public hangings of suspected Zionist spies soon followed before gigantic throngs in Baghdad’s Liberation Square, and Iraq fell under the spell of fear that would continue for thirty-five years, during which Makiya never returned to his native country.

  He joined left-wing exile politics at the most quixotic point along the spectrum—as a revolutionary socialist from the Middle East. The Six-Day War and the Palestinian cause galvanized him, as it did a whole generation of young Arabs, and for a time Makiya was a member of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But according to his and his comrades’ Marxist analysis, the conflict was in essence a class struggle. Ultimately, the workers in Israeli factories and kibbutzim would join hands with the oppressed Arab masses to throw off the yokes of imperialism, feudalism, and capitalism. In Middle Eastern politics this was something of a minority view, and it meant that Makiya pursued a tributary separate from the great wave of Arab nationalism that surged in the 1960s. (As for political Islam, the wave that came next when the nationalist regimes showed themselves to be impotent and corrupt, it had no appeal whatsoever for the resolutely secular and atheist Makiya.) Nonetheless, he and his Iranian-born wife, Afsaneh, threw themselves into the intense world of exile politics, first in Cambridge, later in London, as militant critics of the Western powers, especially the United States.

  They followed events in their home region from afar, through the 1970s and ’80s: as the Palestinian liberation movement turned to terrorism, as Lebanon degenerated into a civil war in which all the factions resembled one another in their barbarism, as the revolution in Iran fell under the control of theocratic mullahs who imposed a reign of terror, as Iraq and Iran plunged into a seemingly endless war that consumed the lives of an entire generation in both countries. And at some point along the way, Makiya’s thinking changed.

  “I could no longer blame it on the United States,” he said. “This was probably the seismic shift in my consciousness. It wasn’t the abstract abandonment of Marxism on the basis of some general principles. No. It was a felt experience—watching and seeing the Lebanese civil war, which had nothing to do with Marxist categories. Watching and seeing the Iranian revolution—again, Marxist categories were defeated. Watching and seeing the Iraq-Iran War. It wasn’t the United States, it was Iraqis and Iranians who were bleeding themselves to death. The fact that there were people out there selling them guns was certainly deplorable, but I’m not going to turn my priorities upside down and refuse to see who’s responsible. So it was this sense that the malaise was principally in my world, and not principally in the United States, that was the seismic shift in my politics.”

  The shift would have large implications. If the malaise was principally in his part of the world, then all the isms of collective salvation—Marxism, nationalism, Baathism, Islamism—now looked like various roads to hell. The region had tried to leap from the Middle Ages right over the eighteenth century to modern, mostly imported dogmas, without enduring that profound rupture when legitimacy is separated from both might and faith, and the rights of the individual are enshrined as the basis of government. What the Middle East needed was an Enlightenment. In 1984, in a letter to a lefti
st friend, Makiya asked, “Could it be possible that a Marx today in a Middle Eastern political context is far less of a revolutionary than, say, a Voltaire?” Living a fairly marginal existence in New York and Cambridge, auditing classes at local universities, reading for the first time the works of Arendt, Hobbes, and Locke in libraries, and working hard on the manuscript of Republic of Fear, Makiya became a liberal.

  As an Iraqi involved in politics, Makiya was something rare in the Arab world. There were plenty of liberation fighters; there were very few dissidents. The Arab sense of victimization at the hands of the imperialist and Zionist foreign enemy left little breathing room for an Egyptian Solzhenitsyn or a Syrian Havel to emerge (let alone survive). Without denying the justice of the Palestinian cause, Makiya began to feel that Arabs shouldn’t regard it as the key to solving regional problems—Palestine no longer came first, either in time or in moral urgency. The crucial issue was no longer national liberation but democracy based on rights and, more profoundly, the value of life. Long after the end of colonialism, though, the stance of the democratic dissident—the critic of homegrown dictatorship—still looked in many Arab circles suspiciously like apostasy, especially when it was carried to its logical conclusion, as Makiya did at the end of the Gulf War, when he came forward and called on America to overthrow the tyrant in Baghdad.

  By 1991, Makiya had come all the way around to the view that America’s sins in the Middle East—and in his mind there were many—were sins of omission, not commission. Far from being an omnipotent puppet master, the United States was ineffectual in the region. The fall of the shah, the Iranian hostage crisis, the botched rescue attempt, the massive bombing at the marine base in Beirut followed by a hasty withdrawal from Lebanon, the kidnapping crisis, the silence that greeted Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds: One display of American fecklessness after another prepared Saddam to believe that he could invade Kuwait with impunity. The United States was a force for ill in the region not because of what it was doing but what it was failing to do. Makiya had originally called on Arabs themselves to repel Saddam’s aggression (the only other Arab willing to push this line, though for very different reasons, was a Saudi construction tycoon named Osama bin Laden), but the task was left to the armies of the Western powers. With the defeated Iraqi army in humiliating retreat back across the border along the “Highway of Death,” with Iraq’s Kurdish and Shiite populations rising up to throw off Baathist rule, America was in a position to erase its shameful record in the region. But the Gulf War ended with a treaty that not only left Saddam where he was but allowed his helicopters to mow down thousands of Iraqis who’d had a glimpse of hope. For Makiya, there was no greater sin of omission.