Ass is in the Gate

or something like that.

i'm reading george packer's Assassin's Gate. i'm only one chapter in, so i don't think i should pass judgment yet (another joke, obviously).

but i've noticed a couple of things already that i'd like to share.

one is that packer can sometimes be imprecise. for example, chapter one is spent parsing out how neoconservative ideas came to be prominent in american foreign policy circles in general and in the second bush administration in particular. in so doing, packer has to, of course, address competing perspectives and give them historical treatment. while i'm extremely interested in packer's view on this -- he share's his own conversion from dove to hawk on iraq -- i'm not too fond of the way he equates the wilsonian ideal of liberal internationalism with that of liberal hawkishness. i'm not saying there aren't any lib-ints who weren't for the war, the bastards. but wilsonians are not, as a group, prone to military action to solve all international conflicts. while packer does a good job, in my opinion, talking about the ways in which many lib-ints wish to rely on international bodies like the UN or NATO to resolve conflict, he takes what i think is an oppositional bias and lets it color his understanding of where liberals positioned themselves in the run-up to -- and during -- the war.

the other is that, i REALLY like this book. i think packer is tremendously gifted as a journalist, and a great writer. terrific. not only that, i find that i agree with a lot of what he says. i've been reading packer for a while now, mostly in the pages of the new yorker. several of his essays there before the war sparked a lot of outrage from readers who felt he was way too hawkish on the war. i'll admit that i was pissed, too, and kept asking myself why a guy like packer was writing for the new yorker and not the new republic. he's not hendrick hertzberg, afterall.

but i see why now. oh, i still disagree quite vehemently with his pro-war essays that appeared in the new yorker several years ago. i make myself feel oh so important by reading them over and saying, i told you so. but the reason packer is writing for the new yorker, and doing a great job, is that he is willing to recognize that he was wrong before. that the war was ill-planned. that the war has come at a tremendous cost for, so far, very little good. he is writing for the new yorker because, after supporting the invasion, he wanted to get a first-hand glimpse of what the war has wrought. upon doing so, he would not let ideological bias blind him to emperical evidence.

there are still many writers at the new republic -- a magazine called by many, quite aptly in my mind, the "joe lieberman weekly" -- who will either, after gaining first-hand knowledge of how ugly the war is, refuse to change their minds for fear of appearing weak, or who will refuse to gain first-hand knowledge and sit back and continue to shill for this tragedy.

i've enjoyed packer's recent writings for the new yorker, and while i still disagree with some of what he says -- especially since i still get the sense from him that he thinks liberal internationalists should advocate preemptive wars -- i think he did the right thing in remembering that he is a journalist and that emperical evidence is the real story.

assassins gate is all the better for it.