The Assassin’s Gate

"Packer is open about his views. He didn’t go to Iraq to fight, obviously, but he was a liberal interventionist, cautiously supportive of the invasion of Iraq, believing that it would liberate people from living under the tyranny of a madman. His intention was not to go to Iraq and cover a failed experiment. I spent a lot of time in Iraq as a reporter, and I would inhale Packer’s reporting in The New Yorker . Every time something new came out, it was the first thing I would read. He’s not one of these bang-bang war reporters, rushing to the scene of battles, just to then sit down at night with a bottle of Scotch and other stubble-faced journalists, regaling each other with stories of their close calls. It’s not his style. He’s the kind of guy who goes two or three levels down. He will sometimes talk to the top people, but he doesn’t get the best information from them. That’s an important lesson that I learned from reading Packer. Packer can tell you the tragedy of Iraq through the story of an actor who worked in the national theatre, or one of Saddam Hussein’s former bodyguards. He could tell you more about Iraq with one line… In the book, he says that one of the first things that struck him when he got to Iraq was that people looked so much older than they actually were. He describes the leathery, hollow cheeks of the men, their grey stubble. There’s a scene where he’s in a taxi cab and the driver asks him how old he is. Packer says 42. And the cabdriver has to stop and write it down, he’s so shocked. He had assumed that Packer was in his 20s. Packer, meanwhile, had assumed the driver was in his 60s, when he was, in fact, 40. It just told you so much about what had happened there. People just aged faster because of the tragedy of what had happened in their country over the previous 20 years. There’s a feeling I get from this book that’s like the feeling I get from Homage to Catalonia . Packer was so deeply disappointed with what happened in Iraq – almost as if it were a personal betrayal. A project that had potential was completely betrayed by the people who were in charge of it. Yes. And that those people who mismanaged the war also betrayed a lot of the people who went to Iraq to try and make it work. Because there were some really smart people there. I was in Iraq in 2003-4, the period the first part of the book is about. A lot of people don’t want to hear this, but the fact of the matter is that you would walk around the streets of Baghdad and people would say to you: ‘Thank you, America!’ But Packer got it pretty early on that it was not working. A lot of journalists were blamed by the Bush administration for being naysayers. But a lot of reporters were pointing out the problems and mismanagement precisely because they wanted to see the plan work. To me, Packer’s book is still the best account of what went wrong there."