The Assassins' Gate by George Packer Read Free Book Online Page A

Vietnam turned most Democrats born after World War II—including me—dovish. Still, the footage of grateful Kuwaitis waving at columns of American troops streaming through the liberated capital knocked something ajar in my worldview. American soldiers were the heroes. In northern Iraq, after the Kurdish uprising, militiamen known as peshmerga drove around with pictures of George H. W. Bush taped to their windshields. This was something new.
    The decade that followed the Gulf War scrambled everything and turned many of the old truths on their heads. The combination of the Cold War’s end, the outbreak of genocidal wars and ethnic conflicts in Europe and Africa, and a Democratic presidency made it possible for liberals to contemplate and even advocate the use of American force for the first time since the Kennedy years. There was more than a little one-eyed partisanship in this thinking, but there was also idealism, for it drew on a powerful idea that came out of one of the twentieth century’s greatest movements, the movement for human rights. The idea was that governments should not be allowed to abuse their own citizens on a massive scale; that sovereignty did not excuse rape, torture, murder, and genocide; that it was the world’s interest and obligation to end these crimes. This new kind of war became known as humanitarian intervention, and in this country its advocates acquired the name liberal interventionists or, in shorthand, liberal hawks.
    Most liberals’ preferred institution for doing the intervening was the United Nations. By 1994, Bosnia and Rwanda, scenes of the decade’s two genocides, had shown that the UN wasn’t up to the task—its efforts in both places only seemed to perpetuate the slaughter and put innocent civilians at greater risk. Though Franklin Roosevelt envisioned the UN as an antifascist organization, it was founded as a body of sovereign nations; its ultimate function was to resolve disputes between them and preserve the status quo. With Libya taking its turn as chair of the Human Rights Commission, the UN was hardly the ideal instrument for stopping atrocities. Nor was it given the necessary push by the powers that sat on the Security Council, especially the United States. The UN and the Western powers passed responsibility for these tragedies back and forth, like a holding-company scheme. But for many citizens, including many American liberals, the unstopped bleeding in these distant places demanded a response, and if it wasn’t going to come from the UN or the European countries, it would have to come from the superpower.
    Without a Soviet Union or a Cold War, these interventions didn’t carry the odor of “vital strategic interest.” The very thing that disqualified Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Kosovo from meriting American force in the eyes of conservatives (“We don’t have a dog in that fight,” Secretary of State James Baker said of Bosnia) made force more thinkable to liberals. The rare Republican supporters of intervention (including Paul Wolfowitz), who saw national interest and the spread of human rights as inextricable, attacked liberals for their utopian dreams. “Airy humanitarianism” sneered Kagan. The fact that some liberals and conservatives supported the same military policies in the nineties didn’t mean that they had started from the same place; nor, a few years later, would they end up together.
    The Republican Party—again, partly out of strategic principle and partly out of naked partisanship—did everything it could to tie Clinton’s hands and prevent the American military from being used to fight distant, obscure wars or provide security in the inevitably messy aftermaths. Few terms were more reviled by Republicans than “nation building.” As Kagan, one of the rare dissenters, observed in 1995, “In a few short years, America had passed through a looking glass into an