Historic transformation on the cheap

'Plan A was that the Iraqi government would be quickly decapitated, security would be turned over to remnants of the Iraqi police and army... and most American forces would leave within a few months. There was no Plan B.' Michiko Kakutani reviews a new book on Iraq by former pro-war liberal, George PackerIn his authoritative and tough-minded new book, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, the New Yorker writer George Packer reminds us that the decision of the Bush administration to go to war against Iraq and its increasingly embattled handling of the occupation were both predicated upon large, abstract ideas about the role of America in the post-cold war world – most notably: a belief in pre-emptive and unilateral action; the viability of exporting democracy abroad; the urge to streamline the military; and the dream of remaking the Middle East.

Like the administration's allegation that Saddam Hussein posed a "grave and gathering danger" and possessed weapons of mass destruction, many of these assumptions would turn out to be wrong – or naïve, overly simplistic and deeply flawed.

Mr Packer writes not as an peacenik but as an "ambivalently pro-war liberal" who had "wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before he committed mass murder again", who had "wanted to see if an open society stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world". If his assessment in these pages of the Bush administration is scorching, it is because he writes as one who shared its hopes of seeing a functioning democracy established in Iraq and who now sees the chances of that happening dwindling in the wake of the administration's bungled handling of the war and occupation.

Most of Mr Packer's observations about the dangerous fallout of administration members' fixed ideas are not new: they have been made before by former consultants to the administration like Larry Diamond, a former senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and the author of the recent book Squandered Victory, and by journalists like Mr Packer's New Yorker colleague, Seymour M. Hersh, the author of Chain of Command.

Other portions of this volume are heavily indebted to earlier books on the Bush administration and its prosecution of the Iraq war, including James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, Anonymous's Imperial Hubris, James Bamford's Pretext for War and Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack.

What The Assassins' Gate may lack in freshness, however, is more than made up for by its wide-angled, overarching take on the Iraq war. Mr Packer traces the roots of the decision to go to war in Iraq back to ideas (involving America's assumption of an aggressive, forward-leaning role in the world, its exercise of what Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called "benevolent global hegemony") that germinated among neoconservatives years ago, and he shows how those ideas gained traction as many of these people assumed high-level jobs in the administration of George W Bush.

As the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill have pointed out, Iraq was on the Bush administration's agenda long before 9/11, but those terrorist attacks gave further impetus to the neoconservatives' agenda, providing a president in search of new ideas with a ready-made strategy and world view.

"By the early spring of 2002", Mr Packer writes, "a full year before the invasion, the administration was inexorably set on a course of war"; the policy had been set, he adds, without arguments for and against an invasion being methodically weighed. According to Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in the State Department, "it was an accretion, a tipping point... a decision was not made –a decision happened, and you can't say when or how".

Preparations for the postwar period were also predicated upon a set of assumptions (based heavily on the word of Iraqi exiles like the neocon favorite Ahmad Chalabi) that administration members, from Vice President Dick Cheney to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, were reluctant to re-evaluate. "Plan A", Mr Packer writes, "was that the Iraqi government would be quickly decapitated, security would be turned over to remnants of the Iraqi police and army, international troops would soon arrive, and most American forces would leave within a few months. There was no Plan B". To dissent from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's minimalist war plan of quick, light force, in Mr Packer's view, was to risk "humiliation and professional suicide". Gen Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, was mocked by Mr Wolfowitz for testifying that the job would require "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers". And when President Bush's economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsay, predicted that the war could cost as much as $200 billion (a figure that would actually turn out to be low), he was "quickly reprimanded and eventually fired".

"The administration systematically kept forecasts of the war's true cost from the public and, by the insidious effects of airtight groupthink, from itself", Mr Packer writes. "This would be historic transformation on the cheap."

That cheapness would have serious consequences for the course of the occupation. The lack of sufficient troops would lead to an inability to prevent looting and restore law and order, which in turn would undermine Iraqi confidence in the Americans; an inability to contain local militias, which would help fuel the insurgency; and an inability to seal the country's borders, which would allow foreign terrorists to enter the country at will. As for funds – which were often insufficient, delayed or mismanaged – Mr Packer writes that "the failure to spend Iraq reconstruction money wisely, or quickly, or at all, became one of the less publicised but more significant scandals of the occupation".

Many of the missteps made during the war and postwar, Mr Packer implies, could have been avoided had the Bush administration been more open to recommendations from experts on Iraq. He writes that the State Department's Future of Iraq project was sidelined because of tensions between the State Department and the Pentagon, and that its coordinator, Tom Warrick, "who had done as much thinking about postwar Iraq as any American official" also "became a casualty of the interagency war and didn't get to Baghdad for a year".

Mr Packer adds that a 2002 offer from Leslie Gelb, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to put together a panel of experts to consult on postwar options, was turned down by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice says that a provisional plan for Iraq's reconstruction, begun by Gen Anthony Zinni, was shrugged off by the Pentagon, shortly before the war, as being too negative. Mr Packer's conclusion: "Where it mattered and could have made a difference, the advice of experts was unwelcome." In the end, Mr Packer blames administration members' arrogance and carelessness about human life (amounting, in his words, "to criminal negligence") for many of the current problems in Iraq. "Swaddled in abstract ideas", he writes, "convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive."

© New York Times