The Ass[assins' Gate]
6 June 2007 at 11.17 am (neo-feudalism, politics)
People always quote that Auden line about how writing negative book reviews is bad for the soul. I submit that the proposition is false: instead, criticism purges one’s soul of the bad book that has unfortunately been read.
Some books are so bad that you can’t read them all the way through. I’ve been looking at some Iraq war books, and I thought that, given its acclaim, I might try George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. I cleared the first hundred pages before deciding that the book was ruining my day. This is the kind of journalistic account about which newspaper reviewers say, “It reads like a novel,” thus calumniating the chosen genre of Cervantes, Stendhal and Eliot. They say it reads like a novel because of sentences like this:
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.”
Worthy of Michael Crichton or, if we really want to be mean about it, Dean R. Koontz. The man described in this sentence is none other than Kanan Makiya, professional Iraqi exile and fanatic for the destruction of a country he hasn’t lived in for thirty-five years. He serves as one of the heroes of Packer’s book; Packer brings to bear all the novelistic techniques of irony to show just how uselessly abstract and creepily megalomanical were Makiya’s plans for Iraq, all the while maintaining Makiya’s nobility in tilting at windmills. Meanwhile, Packer peppers his book with other sentences, such as these:
Why did the United States invade Iraq? It still isn’t possible to be sure—and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War.
Isn’t life mysterious? Perhaps if Packer hadn’t spent the first hundred pages of his “novel” profiling the likes of Makiya, Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, he might have noticed what the U.S. actually did in Iraq. They did what they have long wanted to do domestically: they privatized everything. As in the dreams of teenage anarchists, they smashed the state. The difference is that teenage anarchists want to smash the state so that decentralized self-rule can take hold in human-scale communities, while the neoliberal vanguard instead cleansed Iraq of any public or collective holdings in order to allow their pet corporations to run riot in a gangster’s paradise. I fear that, whether we get Rudy or Hillary, they will bring this show to American soil.
Anyway, Packer portrays the anti-war movement as irresponsible, fanatical and subtly reactionary—as, in fact, the mirror image of Bush:
It embraced the full spectrum [just try to embrace a spectrum, gentle reader!] 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.
We find ourselves here in the liberal topos of uncertainty, nuance and gradualism. That situations are more complex and variable than any moral judgments that can be made about them is a truism. However, in the realm of action one must in the end decide what to do and what not to do. This usually takes the form of an either/or choice, which can, I understand, be painful to make, but as anyone who has ever done anything (e.g., gotten married, chosen a major, quit a job, accepted a job, had a child, gotten a divorce etc. etc.) understands, choices must be made if life is to be lived. The anti-war movement, of which I am proud to say that I was a very small part back in the bleak winter of 2002-03, evaluated the case made for the war, the actors involved, the prospects for a good outcome, the history of American involvement in the region, and the general morality of war, and they decided that the Iraq war was unjust and worthy of being opposed, and they decided moreover to act on this decision.
Packer finds this intolerable because he finds politics intolerable. He is, to such a comic extent that one might think the book a hoax, the feckless liberal mocked by conservatives and radicals alike, the self-congratulating buffoon of the old Phil Ochs song. “My most heated and confounding arguments over the war occurred when no one else was around,” he agonizes. Eventually, though, he decides to take the position of the “ambivalently prowar liberals,” explaining that “[o]ne doesn’t get one’s choice of wars” (a comment ill befitting the citizen of a democracy, I should think). He elaborates his position, telling us that it descends from his belief in the “interventions of the last decade in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo,” which only proves that he has a lot of nerve. He bizarrely seems to think that Iraq differs from these “humanitarian” escapades: “The Iraq War was about something other than human rights and democracy, but it could bring similar benefits.” Recall now that Packer does not know what this “other” thing that so concerns the warmakers is, though he finds laughably extreme those who think it has something to do with energy resources or corporations.
In order to appear fair and balanced, he profiles Eli Pariser, in charge at the time of Moveon.org, since Pariser is a self-described patriot who, though he does oppose the war, has more or less repudiated the left tradition in his own family. Packer just doesn’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, he admires Pariser’s prudential non-radicalism. On the other hand, “[t]he antifascist wars of our own time—in Bosnia and Kosovo— never strongly resonated with Pariser’s generation of activists.” He’s got a point there. Pariser’s generation of activists should have been out on the street in force opposing our government’s murderous neo-Nazi support of the old Ustashe, but alas, I don’t think that’s what Packer had in mind.
For guidance, Packer turns to Leon Wiesletier of The New Republic, who solemnly informs us, “The Second World War still makes me cry.” World War II, you see, is his model for American force, while the anti-war movement fixates on Vietnam: “‘It’s sort of the isolationism of the wounded or the of the traumatized,’” he condescends. That there were real wounds and real traumas, and that the anti-war movement of the time was dead right about Vietnam, he does not stoop to mention. Nor does it occur to him that if Woodrow Wilson had not dragged this country into the pointless slaughter of World War I, against the advice of an anti-war movement whose members he simply jailed, then Hitler and Stalin might never have come to power at all, thus sparing the tears of Mr. Wieseltier.
From the reviews, it seems that Packer will go on to narrate how the Bush administration’s “incompetence” and “cynicism” and whatever else is short of “malice aforethought” betrayed Iraq and the fond liberal dreams of Kanan Makiya and Paul Berman. The first hundred pages are so poorly written and so poorly reasoned, however, that I don’t think I will stay for the rest of his tale. Though he professes to be an ardent democrat, the truth about Packer is that he hates politics and does not understand power. The masters of war understand power well: they want it all for themselves and will kill those who stand in their way. The anti-war movement too understands power: they see how the warmakers lust for it and how destructive their lust is, and so they try to block their access to more power by curtailing their ability to make war. This struggle is what politics is, fundamentally, but Packer finds that such a view sullies his exquisite mind. In the end, he chooses to believe the moral claptrap adduced by warmongers. Finding that they’ve created a hell on earth unrelated to any recognizable morality, he has nowhere to turn but back to his own pretty little consciousness, wafted hither and yon by events and personalities that he can describe but cannot understand.
Why write about this? you ask. Water under the bridge, you say. Quite false. The discrediting of the far right means the rise of the center, and Packer is the center. The Packers of the world will be upon us in any future Democratic administration, complaining like Clinton and Obama about Bush’s “incompetence” and vowing to do it up right the very next time we need to drop “humanitarian bombs,” in the odious phrase of Saint Vaclav Havel.
Two posts ago, I wrote about Edward Said. Packer drags Said into his account for a bit of roughing up, largely because the late, great critic had Makiya’s number way back in 1991. Our author brings up the usual charges—Said blames everything on western imperialism, Said is an out-of-touch mandarin, etc.—and even adds a new one: Said envies Makiya, because Makiya might do for Iraq what Said could never do for Palestine! Truly, we are beyond satire. Said knew this shortly before his death, which is why he wrote an article in March 2003 about the Iraq war that ends with the Wordsworthian apostrophe: “Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” In the middle of this essay, Said clarifies his own position for the benefit of Makiya and his ilk, before concluding with a sentence worthy of Johnson. Again, I give him the last word, with my emphasis:
I have been criticised recently for my anti-war position by illiterates who claim that what I say is an implied defence of Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime. To my Kuwaiti critics, do I need to remind them that I publicly opposed Ba’athi Iraq during the only visit I made to Kuwait in 1985, when in an open conversation with the then Minister of Education Hassan Al-Ibrahim I accused him and his regime of aiding and abetting Arab fascism in their financial support of Saddam Hussein? I was told then that Kuwait was proud to have committed billions of dollars to Saddam’s war against “the Persians”, as they were then contemptuously called, and that it was a more important struggle than someone like me could comprehend. I remember clearly warning those Kuwaiti acolytes of Saddam Hussein about him and his ill will against Kuwait, but to no avail. I have been a public opponent of the Iraqi regime since it came to power in the 70s: I never visited the place, never was fooled by its claims to secularism and modernisation (even when many of my contemporaries either worked for or celebrated Iraq as the main gun in the Arab arsenal against Zionism, a stupid idea, I thought), never concealed my contempt for its methods of rule and fascist behaviour. And now when I speak my mind about the ridiculous posturing of certain members of the Iraqi opposition as hapless strutting tools of US imperialism, I am told that I know nothing about life without democracy (about which more later), and am therefore unable to appreciate their nobility of soul. Little notice is taken of the fact that barely a week after extolling President Bush’s commitment to democracy Professor Makiya is now denouncing the US and its plans for a post-Saddam military-Ba’athi government in Iraq. When individuals get in the habit of switching the gods whom they worship politically there’s no end to the number of changes they make before they finally come to rest in utter disgrace and well deserved oblivion.