Author(s): George Packer

SECONDHAND BOOKS | POLITICS

The Assassin's Gate is the main entrance to the Green Zone, the fortified enclave of Saddam's former palaces that now houses the US military and political leadership in Baghdad. George Packer's remarkable book is an account of how America found itself in occupation of Iraq, using the country as a laboratory for the dissemination of democracy in the Middle East. The book is also an anatomy of chaos and failure, of how a utopian experiment went disastrously wrong. George Packer started writing about Iraq as an uneasy supporter of military action to topple Saddam Hussein. Heavily influenced at the time by the Iraqi opposition, he shows how exiles like Kanan Makiya nurtured a dream of democratising a homeland that most of them had not seen for decades. Makiya and his friends found common ground with a new breed of revolutionaries, the neo-conservatives, who believed that acts of political will could change the landscape of the Middle East. Packer's analysis of their schemes is humane and unpolemical, but as the theories were forced up against reality they began to crumble, and Packer shows how individual American soldiers and civilians, and Iraqis from all backgrounds, began to pay a terrible price for the lack of preparation and of realism that marked the invasion and Paul Bremer's period of overlordship. Packer's intimate narrative is based throughout on the experiences of people caught up in violence and confusion. He describes, for example, the effects of the war on the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq, and on a young Iraqi woman who had hoped for secular liberation and found only religious oppression. Packer is also frank about his own evolving views, and paints a dark picture of Iraq's future in the aftermath of the 2005 elections. This is a literary work of contemporary history that is adequate to its terrible subject, the most controversial foreign policy adventure since Vietnam. First published 2005.

Faber and Faber, 2006. A trade paperback copy in very good condition.