George Packer at Politics and Prose Bookstore

We went to see Packer speak about his new book, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, last night. The better half is reading the book (I get it next), and based on what she says and what I've read, in reviews, and what Packer himself read last night, it sounds like a great book. I've noticed that the book has received less attention than it probably deserves. Packer was asked about this (not in exactly those terms), and he said that the problem is that this book does not have a simple message that fits on a bumper sticker. It's not "Stay the Course," nor is it "Pull Out." Packer himself is a "liberal hawk," and he supported the war. He still does, kind of. He takes what I have taken to calling the "responsibility" position: even if the war was a mistake, we are responsible for the state of Iraq, and we can't just leave.

This is a difficult issue, and it was interesting to see a smart person, who has been to Iraq and reported from there, wrestle with these complexities. Many people in the audience wanted "red meat," and Packer provides that in criticizing how the Administration got us into the war (if I hadn't lived through it, I would find this story incredible, even impossible). But he wouldn't offer any simple answers about where to go from here.

My one complaint, about the presentation. Packer easily falls into the false dichotomy between liberal internationalism and isolationism and voices the concern that failure in Iraq will lead the Democrats, especially, to retreat to an isolationist position. I think that this is the neo-conservative frame, and to adopt it, wholesale, guarantees that the neo-cons win almost every debate of foreign policy ideas. In reality, there are few actual isolationists in U.S. politics, and they are really marginal(ized). There are many varieties of liberal internationalism, and neo-con hawkishness is just one of those. I understand that the current Administration tries to wrap itself in the Wilsonian flag (at least some of the time, when it's convenient and might shut up Democratic criticism). But the debate that needs to take place, and probably is, is one within liberal internationalism, and not between a monolithic liberal internationalism and some archaic notion of "isolationism."

(Realism will play a role in that debate, but the actual number of "true" realists in the U.S. foreign policy debate today is small, and it's even smaller if one only counts those under sixty years of age. Speaking of old realists, the Brent Scowcroft profile in the latest issue of The New Yorker, by Jeffrey Goldberg, is definitely worth reading. Scariest quotation in the piece, Condoleezza Rice to Scowcroft: "The world is a messy place, and someone has to clean it up.")

Btw, Packer said that most of Iraq is now completely "off-limits" to Americans, except heavily armed troops. That, as a result, no one--not reporters, not the military, not the U.S. government--has any idea what is happening in most of the country.

A very sober, serious gathering. And a packed house, too. Packer made a comment about how it was great to have such a big crowd in a town where he didn't have many friends or any family. But this is D.C. People here, if nowhere else, read books about politics.