All Packer, All The Time

O.k., the thing about the Packer book is--contrary to the opinions of some of my leftish peeps who haven't read it--it's not a defense of the claim that the invasion was justified. To put words in Packer's mouth, here's how I'd summarize his position in the book so far:

God, Saddam was bad. He was unbelievably bad. I knew the administration was FoS on this thing, but, after much analysis and agonizing over the question, I came to the conclusion that even a dishonest war would be better than continuing to allow the Iraqis to suffer under Saddam. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I radically underestimated the incompetence and intellectual dishonesty of this administration, and underestimated the challenges we face in Iraq.

For complicated and possibly not very good reasons I've articulated ad nauseam, I'm sympathetic to Packer here even though I ultimately--and reluctantly--opposed the invasion.

But the point of the book--thus far and so far as I can tell--is not to defend Packer's pre-war position on invasion, but, rather, to document the incompetence and dishonesty of the administration. Cankerous as I am, I insisted on starting out by emphasizing stuff I knew most folks around here would disagree with. Packer says lots of stuff I disagree with, too. But (unlike many folks) I don't evaluate books on the basis of how much I agree with them. In fact, I find the most interesting stuff in Packer to be the stuff that I don't agree with.

At any rate, my copy of the book is a mass of underlining. Almost every page has something worth reading again. There's too much to quote here, but here's something--chosen almost at random from my mass of underlined passages--that's worth repeating. It's about the (in)famous bombing of the wedding party in Afghanistan:

"But when Wolfowitz met with embassy officials, he began to grill the political officer: 'Why do you assume there was a wedding party? How do you know?' Maybe, Wolfowitz said, the Taliban had disguised themselves as revelers--that was his hunch about the incident. 'We shouldn't be so passive in apologizing. We should be more confident.' The officials listened in silence, appalled. Later, one of them told me, 'It was almost like he was creating this alternate reality. With Wolfowitz, self-righteousness had a dangerous habit of overwhelming inconvenient facts. A government official who worked with him on Iraq said, 'Paul Wolfowitz, for all his good qualities, has an unfortunate ability to delude himself because he believes so passionately in things." (Packer, p. 117)

That is, PW isn't so much what you'd call a member of the reality-based community...

But Packer's good, and the picture of Wolfowitz that emerges is not entirely unsympathetic. The picture that emergest is that of a man with deep moral convictions including an abiding hatred of tyranny. Those convictions are, apparently, at least partially responsible for blinding him to certain important facts about invasion. One can't tell from the brief character sketch in this book whether PW is mostly a good man who made some terrible mistakes or...a rather different kind of person altogether. But he doesn't seem to be the demon some people of my acquaintance believe him to be.

Not everyone on The Other Side is protrayed with this much sympathy. Cheney, for example, comes across as a scary nut. This is consistent with other things we have good reason to believe...

Blah, blah, blah. Read it, read it, read it. It's a complex portrait of a complex and tragic tangle of events.

One last quote on a different subject, but one relevant to things we've argued about here in the past:

"He [Erdmann] joked that he hoped never to write a book on Iraq called Strange Defeat. But it made no sense to him to claim any certainty about how Iraq would emerge from the ordeal. 'I'm very cautious about dealing with anyone talking about Iraq who's absolutely sure one way or the other.'"

Amen, brother. Funny that the one thing many righties and lefties of my acquaintance have in common: they claim that Iraq is a done deal. But they disagree about which way it's done. It's either certain victory or certain defeat, depending on who you're talking to.

That is, of course, bullshit. Nobody knows, even today, how this will all play out. I'm sticking with the experts and guessing it's a 50-50 matter.

And, as I've said before, that's as much proof as we need that the administration's policies have failed. Even if we--and Iraqi democracy--ultimately prevail, the fact that Bush's policies got us to a place where we've only got a 1 in 2 chance of winning constitutes a failure in and of itself.