The Assassins' Gate
by George Packer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

There is a high sandstone arch guarding the point of entry into the Green Zone, on the banks of the Tiber River, where the Coalitional Provisional Authority (CPA) made their headquarters after the fall of Saddam. It appears ancient, but was built by Saddam Hussein to ape the dignity of Baghdad's antique architecture. A mile away gigantic arms cast and smelted from models of Saddam's own hold aloft giant swords crossed into a forbidding arch over the military parade ground in the center of Baghdad. The underlying pavement is embedded with the bullet-scarred helmets of dead Iranian soldiers, which would be crushed and stomped on by tanks and army men during ceremonial parades. The local people called it simply the Palace Gate, with a shudder, while the nickname eventually arose that rings quite differently: The Assassins' Gate.

George Packer's gripping and prosaic account of the political overture, military clash, and social aftermath of the Iraq War begins with this scenery and expands beautifully from the title image outward. This war has long needed a voice which can not merely cut through partisan rhetoric and "tell it like it really is," but to encapsulate the chaos of a moment meeting history, embody this anxious connection, and live to tell the tale. Surviving a narrative like Iraq takes not only a shockproof bullshit detector (Hemingway's suggested writerly tool) but also the compassionate and ironic eye of an excellent journalist. Packer's got all this and more.

He'd have to, since he traveled in Iraq four times to cover the situation for the New Yorker. "The Assassins' Gate" is the culmination of this obsession and experience. One benefit the reader gets is Packer's principled and unorthodox position, politically speaking. He is a profoundly reflective and abiding leftist who supported the war. His historical roots in the Left are movingly laid out in his earlier work "Blood Of The Liberals," a political and familial history of three generations of the Left in America. He has abandoned none of the democratic principles he has written so compellingly of in his earlier work. His wit hasn't suffered, either — Packer describes his support for Operation Iraqi Freedom winning out over his reservations "by the same margin that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000."

Packer is a novelist as well as a journalist, and brings serious empathy and respect to a culture and a people jarred and fractured under years of despotism. His obvious gift for characterization shines through on every page of visceral, humane, boots-on-the-ground reporting. Part of the value and power of the account is the fascinating, well-drawn people you meet straight from the streets of Karbala, Baghdad, Kuwait, and many others. He gets to places that television cameras only glint over, and tells the human story without flinching in the heat of a dangerous sun.

One of these is the figure of Kenan Makiya, a Boston academic and Iraqi exile who is writing a history of Saddam's psychopathic butchery. Charmingly disheveled, absent-minded, he has both eyes so focused on history he can't walk straight. His story is of anguished separation from his beloved wife and his native soil, which kindles the interest in both Packer and the reader in what an upturned Iraqi nation might mean. His anguished pride and aching loss culminate in a final scene where Makiya ruefully explains that his friend, the slippery and cynical Ahmad Chalabi, once considered him "the triumph of hope over experience."

A more earthy and resourceful (and more common) example of Iraq's huddling masses yearning to breathe free is the Sheikh Emad al-Din al-Awadi, a cunning entrepreneur, Islamic theologian, and ex-inmate of Saddam's despicable prisons. The Sheikh is in possession of hundreds of prisoner files from that era. These files are a part of the ugly history of the country, and are fervently sought after as human record and political tool. There is a moment when the Sheikh is asked to acknowledge that these files belong to the Iraqi people. He responds: "We ask humanity to work together to keep these documents. They don't belong to any one person, or even to the Iraqis, but to all humanity. Maybe Bush is a second Saddam, and maybe he's better."

Later on in the engagement, Packer asks him what the right role for Islam should be in a new-fangled democracy. The Sheikh, who is leaving the room to pray, looks him dead in the eyes and outlines what haunts the entire debacle of Iraq from both our side and theirs: "Trust me, and I'll tell you honestly. I believe in Socrates and his circle. There's a line in the middle." He draws an imaginary line across a coaster on his desk." One side is hot, the other cold. This is the middle. As the philosopher believed, the best is the middle. Is that enough for you, or do you have other questions?"

Reasons for why the administration could not and cannot find the "middle" — at home as well as abroad — are not in the least neglected. Packer spends a great deal of time detailing the neoconservative philosophy that launched this war. It makes for some anxious truth telling. There's a moment when a member of the CPA stationed in Kuwait, awaiting work in Baghdad, makes an off-color remark over dinner and is immediately silenced as paranoid heads turn every which way to make sure no overseer has heard it. Someone whispers, "Doesn't this remind you a little bit of the kind of government we're trying to topple?"

This story has a tragic sense of authority and dignity, in that it fleshes out the all too painful fact that messianic zeal and unctuous propagandistic rhetoric is a road to ruin. The will to liberate can become just as obnoxious as the will to conquer, censor, and centralize. The reaction of those living on the receiving end of what resembles occupational dominance is given sensible, emphatic, and luminous color. This is reason enough for Packer's quietly powerful testament to be distributed in Washington hotel rooms like the Gideon Bible.

It's clichéd to say that in war, truth is the first casualty. Objectivity may very well be a myth. So long as humans discuss and react to what other humans are doing, it may be impossible. This does not mean truth is non-existent, a mask for power, or a social relic. It means that truth — the essence of things as they are and were and will evolve to be — should be sought after more than ever. One way to seek is to observe, write, and record. Packer's book follows this ancient directive all the way to the Assassins' Gate.

— Matt Hanson (junglegroove@gmail.com)