The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Makiya wasn’t interested in keeping everyone happy and arriving at a consensus that would ensure no spoilers would be left out. He was more concerned with the democratic product than the democratic process of the Democratic Principles Working Group. Dissenting views were relegated to footnotes or appended at the end of the report. In one appendix, a political economist named Isam al-Khafaji emphasized the irony in Makiya’s method:

  A FINAL COMMENT regards the exaggerated self-admiration and quotes of certain declarations, or acts—no matter how trivial—that one member of the coordinating committee has written or done. THIS, ALONG SIDE THE PATRIMONIAL ROLE OF THE DOCUMENT WHICH DECIDED TO REJECT WHAT DOES NOT FIT WITH ITS POINTS OF VIEW, SEND AN ALARMING SIGNAL TO ALL OF US ABOUT OUR DEMOCRATIC PRETENSIONS WHILE WE ARE STILL IN EXILE!!!!

  “Kanan,” said Feisal Istrabadi, “wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

  Yet the “Report on the Transition to Democracy in Iraq” is a visionary document. It could never have been written by a committee: There’s something in it to offend everyone, for Makiya didn’t shy away from the implications of his own ideas. In discussing federalism, the sine qua non of Kurdish participation in a future Iraqi state, he argued that regions based on Arab and Kurdish identity would lead to a patchwork nation of second-class citizens; to guarantee absolute equality, federalism should be geographic, not ethnic—and a federal Iraq would no longer be an officially Arab Iraq. On the relation between mosque and state in overwhelmingly Islamic Iraq, Makiya wrote that a separation of the two “will have assisted in realizing the creative and spiritual potential present in religious faith when it is not shackled to the ebb and flow of politics.” This non-Arab, secular country should be demilitarized, along Japanese lines, so that Iraq would never again be an aggressor nation, and debaathified, along German lines, in order to root out the totalitarian ideology from the state and the society. There should be war-crimes trials, a truth and reconciliation commission, and a human-rights commission. A liberal constitution, with protections for individual and minority-group rights, should be written in advance of elections, or else democracy would produce a tyranny of the majority. Finally, since no opposition politics existed inside Saddam’s Iraq, the nucleus of the first post-Saddam government should be formed at the opposition conference scheduled for the end of 2002 in London. It should be prepared to take authority over the first piece of Iraq liberated by American and allied troops (this provisional government should eventually double its numbers within Iraq). Thousands of exiles should be trained as a security force to impose law and order after the fall of the regime.

  Makiya hadn’t lived in Iraq for thirty-five years, the years of Saddam. In the report on democracy, he was trying to think his way out of all that blood-drenched history. As exiles dream and languish, they give in to grandiosity or despair, sink in their own insignificance and then rebel against it. The trouble with the Iraqi émigrés, Condoleezza Rice told Makiya’s close colleague Rend Rahim in late November, is that “they’re like the London Poles”—the ineffectual Polish government in exile during World War II. In the nostrils of hardheaded American officials, these Iraqis carried an odor of inauthenticity; they had no business setting up provisional governments; the real Iraqis were inside the country. Makiya rejected this scheme, and when others accused him of refusing to accept Iraq’s realities, he bridled. “I don’t want to accept them, as they are,” Makiya told me. “They are political realities, after all. There are other realities.” Philosophically, Makiya was a universalist. He was ready to believe that Iraqis inside Iraq were hungry for new realities, and that they were the same ones he himself believed in, if only leadership would show the way. Other Arab countries were mired in anti-Western ideologies, but the disastrous years of Baath Party rule had created what might be called Iraqi exceptionalism. When he met Rice at the White House, Makiya tried to sum up half a lifetime of thinking. The political consciousness of Iraqis had diverged from that of their Arab neighbors in very important ways, he told her. While the Arab and Muslim worlds criticized the United States for interfering in internal Iraqi affairs, Iraqis criticized the United States for not interfering enough. For these reasons, he said, “A new kind of politics is imaginable in Iraq.” Iraq was uniquely suited to become the first liberal Arab country. The report on the transition to democracy was Makiya’s attempt to will the outcome.

  “The document is just paper at the end of the day,” he told me one snowy evening at his Cambridge apartment in late 2002. “One of the less grandiose impulses behind it was this: There’s a world of people out there deeply, deeply skeptical whether or not this country can make it to democracy. And I know deep down that they have good reason to be skeptical. I’m not really as rosy, I’m not as naïve, as sometimes I appear on this question. But it seems to me, for history’s sake, important to have a group of Iraqis turn out a decent document that can be taken seriously, that will be picked up and remembered and churned over and used as some kind of a test, some kind of a yardstick against which to measure the progress of things afterward. And it was, after all, produced by Iraqis—so that Iraqis can lift their heads up a bit and go out there in the world and say, ‘We meant it. It wasn’t all a word game. Some of us tried to give it a shot.’”

  * * *

  IN LATE NOVEMBER, Makiya was invited to appear on a panel at New York University. Everyone else on the panel—academic experts, liberal journalists, a British former diplomat—opposed a war in Iraq. Professor Michael Walzer, a political theorist who had written the book Just and Unjust Wars, explained in his soft, hesitant way that a war in Iraq wouldn’t qualify as just. There was no imminent threat to merit preemption. There was no humanitarian crisis to warrant intervention. The time to overthrow Saddam was in 1988, when Kurdish villages were being gassed, or in 1991, when Iraqis were rising up against the regime, or even in 1998, when Saddam defied the world and threw out UN weapons inspectors. But now, with a new round of inspections just beginning, and diplomacy ongoing at the UN, and the allied no-fly zone protecting the Kurds in the north, what was the just cause for war? “There is no mass murder now,” Walzer said. “That’s the box we’re in.” The administration in Washington was contemplating a preventive, not a preemptive war, Walzer argued, and there’s no basis in just-war theory for such wars of choice. Containment was still working—even if the Iraqi people were among those being contained. Walzer, a passionate supporter of the Balkan interventions in the 1990s, with no illusions about the nature of the regime in Baghdad, seemed unhappy with his own conclusion. But there it was. One by one, the others agreed. The crowded auditorium settled into a comfortable consensus.

  Makiya was the last to speak. In a charcoal jacket and gray shirt open at the collar, he leaned forward with an apologetic smile and said, “I’m afraid I’m going to strike a discordant note.” The discussion, he said, had been a selfishly American one. The other panelists had failed to take into account the Iraqi people themselves, who would pay the highest price in the event of a war, and whose organized opposition groups overwhelmingly wanted one. He described the opposition conference planned for early December in London, and then he turned to the division within the Bush administration. Mistrust was now so great that the Pentagon and vice president’s office had sent representatives to sit in on State’s Future of Iraq Project meetings. “The strongest support for democrats and independents comes from these hawks,” he said. “We have the support of those arch-warmongers Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary Rumsfeld, and the vice president’s office. The reasonable Colin Powell is utterly uninterested in this and wants to have nothing to do with us.” Makiya called Powell “an appeaser.”

  Having upended his audience’s settled categories, Makiya went on to describe the vision of democracy drawn in his report. “This is radical stuff in the Arab world,” Makiya said. “This is dynamite stuff.” He was coming to the end, his voice growing stronger, and there was a sudden ungrounded energy in the room. He had ever
yone’s attention. “The Iraqi opposition is something new in Arab politics. It can be encouraged or it can be crushed just like that. But think about what you’re doing if you do crush it. I rest my moral case on the following: If there is a sliver of a chance of what I just said happening, a five to ten percent chance, you have a moral obligation, I say, to do it.”

  The room exploded in applause. The other panelists looked startled. Against the reasonable arguments of these reasonable people, Makiya was offering something more attractive—the face of hope, however slender.

  “It’s very hard to respond,” Walzer said.

  It was hard because a man like Walzer didn’t want to stand in the way of a dream like Makiya’s. He didn’t want to be on the other side of a great moral question. “I would not join an antiwar movement that strengthened the hand of Saddam,” Walzer told me later, and when I asked whether there could be an antiwar movement that didn’t, he admitted, “It’s very hard to think of what form it could take.”

  In fact, by the winter of 2002–2003, with the excruciatingly long buildup and the ritual dance of diplomacy at the UN, there was an actual antiwar movement, in the United States and around the world, and it was growing very fast. It embraced the full spectrum of opposition, from the banners of extremist groups that proclaimed “No Blood for Oil” to the moderate calls for weapons inspections and international law of the far larger Internet-based organization Moveon.org. The message, though, like that of most protest movements, was a simple one: Stop the war. All the difficult questions raised by the prospect of a war in Iraq were erased by these three words. For the antiwar movement, morality lined up entirely on its side.

  I met the most appealing face of the movement that winter in a bright yellow room two floors above the traffic of West Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan—a room so small that its occupant burned himself on the heat pipe when he turned over in bed and could commute to his office without touching the floor. Eli Pariser, twenty-two, tall, bearded, was spending long hours every day at his desk hunched over a laptop, plotting strategy on behalf of Moveon.org and directing the electronic traffic of an instantaneous movement that was partly assembled in his computer. In three months it had gathered the numbers that took three years to build during Vietnam.

  Pariser’s divorced parents, who had raised him in rural Maine, were veterans of the sixties. Pariser was something else: a self-described patriot, unfailingly polite and thoughtful, with a copy of the Constitution on his bookshelf, who worried about the effect of a war on America’s reputation in the world. He seemed to exist so that the rest of the country couldn’t dismiss the antiwar movement as a fringe phenomenon of graying pacifists and young nihilists. Pariser told me, “I just don’t know that it makes sense for us to risk everything that we’re risking both in terms of international stature and in terms of the lives of our military people for a vague idea that people think it could be better without this guy.”

  There was a case to be made for this nuanced view, and it moved millions of Americans. But the first thing to notice was its essential conservatism. Containment preserved the status quo along with a notion of American virtue. Pariser descended on his father’s side from Zionist Jews who helped found Tel Aviv, and on his mother’s from Polish socialists. But the aggressive antifascism that once characterized young people on the left had given way, in the wake of Vietnam and the green movement, to a softer, more cautious worldview that often amounted in practice to isolationism. The antifascist wars of our own time—in Bosnia and Kosovo—never strongly registered with Pariser’s generation of activists. When I asked whether the desires of Iraqis themselves should be taken into account, he said, “I don’t think that first and foremost this is about them as much as it’s about us and how we act in the world.”

  This was more honest than much of what I heard on the morning of February 15, 2003, at the massive antiwar rally held near the United Nations. It was a frigid day in New York, but hundreds of thousands of people braved the cold (millions more came out worldwide), filling First Avenue from Fifty-first to Seventy-second Street. Behind the makeshift stage, Pariser made a point of introducing himself to Dennis Kucinich, the elfin, jug-eared Democratic congressman from Cleveland who was hinting that he might launch an antiwar campaign for president. Kucinich, who had followed Pariser’s rise, declared, “Eli has proven we’re in a new era of grass-roots activism. The basis for human unity is not just electronic—the human unity precedes the electronic, and then is furthered by it. Eli represents ‘the advancing tide’ which Emerson said ‘creates for itself a condition of its own. And the question and the answer are one.’”

  The spirit of Emerson was on First Avenue. There is a very old American type of protester—Emerson’s friend Thoreau, for example, or John Brown, whom they both admired, or more recently the Berrigan brothers—who sees politics as an expression of personal morality and for whom strategic thinking is a kind of sin. Once the basic question of conscience has been answered, these moralists don’t take much interest in the details or the consequences. In Thoreau’s words, “They attend no caucus, they make no compromise, they use no policy.” This spirit has its evangelical strain as well—it belonged to President Bush as much as to his antiwar opponents, who mirrored each other in viewing the world through a lens of moral polarity. So the prospect that the antiwar movement might strengthen Saddam’s hand didn’t matter. I asked Leslie Cagan, the founder of the group that had organized the rally, whether a speaker who wanted to make explicitly pro-Saddam remarks would be kept off the stage. “We try not to edit people,” she said.

  When Eli Pariser had his ninety seconds onstage, wearing a suit and tie, he was almost literally bouncing on his toes in the arctic air, unable not to smile. “For each person who’s here, there are a hundred who weren’t able to make it,” he announced to the cheering throng up First Avenue. “I know—I get e-mail from them. They’re ordinary, patriotic, mainstream Americans.” Most of the other speakers were more strident, and at times the event took on the tone of a solidarity rally with the Iraqi people, lumped together with the Palestinians, as if their interests were the same. A young woman from Def Poetry Jam shouted, “We send our love to poets in Iraq and Palestine. Stay safe!” The notion that there was neither safety in Iraq nor, strictly speaking, poets—that the Iraqi people, while not welcoming the threat of bombs, might be realistic enough to accept a war as their only hope of liberation from tyranny—was literally unthinkable. Richie Havens sang “Freedom,” just like at Woodstock, but I couldn’t help wondering: for whom? The protesters saw themselves as defending Iraqis from the terrible fate that the United States was preparing to inflict on them. Why would Iraqis want war? The movement’s assumptions were based on moral innocence—on an inability to imagine the horror in which Iraqis lived, and a desire for all good things to go together, for total vindication. War is evil; therefore, the prevention of war must be good.

  That winter, Americans lived in a nearly unbearable pause. Everyone knew deep down that war was coming. But the great powers were enacting an artificial drama to try to avoid war, and in the seemingly eternal interim a kind of rhetorical hysteria thrived on all sides. Anyone who raised perfectly legitimate questions about the war became a “cheese-eating surrender monkey,” whole nations of Europe were branded with the shame of appeasement, and in the congressional cafeteria French fries were renamed Freedom fries. War fever induced a surge of testosterone in lifelong noncombatants who had suddenly discovered their inner Churchill. Meanwhile, President Bush’s implacable certitudes drove his opponents to paint him as one of history’s monsters of aggression, deluded by Zionists and intoxicated with oil lust. Politicians and movie stars traveled to Baghdad and got taken in by the Baathist propaganda machine. A few of them stayed on as human shields, doing their best to keep a true monster of aggression in power over his silenced countrymen.

  In the midst of this din, it was hard to think clearly. Many people allowed historical analogies to do their thinkin
g for them. In the end it came down to two. Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic told me, “I’ve always thought that people in our generation, maybe in the last fifty years in America, have operated with two primal scenes: one was the Second World War, one was the Vietnam War. And you can almost divide the camps on the use of American force between those whose model of its application was the Second World War and those whose model for its application was Vietnam.” For Wieseltier, the primal scene was World War II, because his parents had survived it in Europe. “The Second World War still makes me cry. People for whom Vietnam is their primal scene—and there are lots of them—I expect very little from them in the way of understanding. It’s sort of the isolationism of the wounded or of the traumatized.”

  But World War II and Vietnam were not reliable guides to Iraq. The invocation of Munich and appeasement by one side, or Tonkin Gulf and deception by the other, seemed like ways to shut off debate rather than engage it. My most heated and confounding arguments over the war occurred when there was no one else around. 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. 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. One doesn’t get one’s choice of wars. To give my position a label, I belonged to the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently prowar liberals, who supported a war by about the same margin that the voting public had supported Al Gore. This position descended from the interventions of the last decade in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The Iraq War was about something other than human rights and democracy, but it could bring similar benefits. I wanted Iraqis to be let out of prison; I wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before he committed mass murder again; I wanted to see if an open society stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world. More than anyone else, Kanan Makiya guided my thinking, and I always found it easier to imagine a happy outcome when I was within earshot of him.