Pro-War Liberals Frozen in the Headlights
Pro-War Liberals Frozen in the Headlights (Harpers.org): "Packer's book is nothing if not the autobiography of a liberal dupe. Its central narrative concerns the political journey of Packer's Svengali, Kanan Makiya, whose ascent from Iraqi Trotskyist and anti-Saddam exile to Cambridge (Mass.) intellectual to friend of Ahmed Chalabi to intimate adviser to Bush's “cabal” of right-wing radicals is related in excruciating detail.
Like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, Makiya fancies himself a “revolutionary” using bullets made in the forges of the Enlightenment. But the whole neo-con notion of “shocking” the Arab and Muslim worlds onto the true and only path of “democracy” parallels the merciless Bolshevik mentality of 1917 more than it follows on the tolerant ruminations of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
So what if tens of thousands of bystanders get killed in the wake of the overwhelming historical forces of progress? Like Lenin and Trotsky, the neo-cons want world revolution, not slow evolution.
Packer reports (without evident irony) that Makiya told Bush that invading Iraq would “transform the image of America in the Arab world” (boy, did it ever), and he quotes his brainy pal as explaining to the president that once freed of Saddam Hussein, “people will greet the troops with sweets and flowers.” Yet even after 2 1/2 years of carnage, the tender, doubt-filled George Packer is still seduced by his “idealistic” Iraqi soulmate.
Despite the “recklessness of its authors,” Packer writes, “the Iraq war was always winnable; it still is.”
I'll grant Packer this much: He has a terrific, if unwitting, ear for the absurd and the grotesque. In The Assassins' Gate we learn that Makiya wept while he sat with Bush in front of a TV and watched Saddam's statue pulled down, in what we now know was a staged photo op — also that “the sound of the first bombs falling on Baghdad was, to Makiya, a joyful noise.” "
Like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, Makiya fancies himself a “revolutionary” using bullets made in the forges of the Enlightenment. But the whole neo-con notion of “shocking” the Arab and Muslim worlds onto the true and only path of “democracy” parallels the merciless Bolshevik mentality of 1917 more than it follows on the tolerant ruminations of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
So what if tens of thousands of bystanders get killed in the wake of the overwhelming historical forces of progress? Like Lenin and Trotsky, the neo-cons want world revolution, not slow evolution.
Packer reports (without evident irony) that Makiya told Bush that invading Iraq would “transform the image of America in the Arab world” (boy, did it ever), and he quotes his brainy pal as explaining to the president that once freed of Saddam Hussein, “people will greet the troops with sweets and flowers.” Yet even after 2 1/2 years of carnage, the tender, doubt-filled George Packer is still seduced by his “idealistic” Iraqi soulmate.
Despite the “recklessness of its authors,” Packer writes, “the Iraq war was always winnable; it still is.”
I'll grant Packer this much: He has a terrific, if unwitting, ear for the absurd and the grotesque. In The Assassins' Gate we learn that Makiya wept while he sat with Bush in front of a TV and watched Saddam's statue pulled down, in what we now know was a staged photo op — also that “the sound of the first bombs falling on Baghdad was, to Makiya, a joyful noise.” "
posted by Peter @ 3:28 PM
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