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

upside-down world where (some) liberal Democrats were calling for U.S. military action abroad while conservative Republicans warned of swamps, sand traps, neocolonialism, and ‘another Vietnam.’ The result was a timid and uncertain Democratic President whose few halfhearted gestures toward internationalist leadership were attacked and constrained by a Republican opposition in Congress.”
    For lifelong doves, the first sip of this drink called humanitarian intervention carried a special thrill. All the drama, the intense heat of argument, was generated in the decision whether or not to go to war. In this moment one’s moral credentials were on the line. It was a kind of existential choice, a statement of values, all the more potent for being politically unorthodox and sometimes even brave. None of this made the decisions any less serious or sincere, but the more mundane questions of what would happen later tended to dissolve in a mist of high purpose. And because liberal hawks responded to humanitarian crises, they were less likely to think strategically about the shape of the world in ten or twenty years; the long-range answers they offered, such as international criminal courts, UN resolutions, and regional intervention forces, seemed like noble wishes rather than practical answers. Over and over, they had to fall back on the solution with which they felt least comfortable—American power.
    Among the causes of the liberal hawks of the nineties, Iraq never made the list. Iraq had been a humanitarian crisis in 1988, when Saddam committed genocide against the Kurds at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, and again in 1991, when Saddam massacred the Shia and Kurds who had risen up at the end of the Gulf War. Apart from Kanan Makiya and a few other lonely voices, no one was calling for armed intervention to overthrow the Baathist regime back then. The idea hadn’t yet taken hold. Of course, one could argue, every day under Saddam’s rule in Iraq was a humanitarian crisis. Human Rights Watch and other organizations meticulously documented the Baath Party’s vast crimes. But without the eyes of the media, without reports of mass graves, and with the fear that war in Iraq would produce large-scale casualties, a dictator who had far more blood on his hands than Slobodan Milo&sbrave;ević managed to avoid the relentless opprobrium of the interventionists of the nineties. Perhaps the Arab world was somehow beyond the reach of human rights in a way that Bosnia and Kosovo were not. Perhaps the fact that the United States had strategic interests in the region (oil), and that the issue of Iraq involved unconventional weapons as well as mass murder, made the question of war more complicated for “airy humanitarians.” In any event, the Clinton years ended with no sense that the achievement in the Balkans should be followed up in Mesopotamia, or anywhere else. The liberal hawks had always been a minority, even among Democrats.
    The small, inconclusive wars of the nineties raised but failed to answer the essential questions of the post–Cold War world: What do human rights have to do with national security? What should the United States do about threats that the world insists on ignoring? Is it necessary for war to have the sanction of an international body? What are the limits of sovereignty? Can democracy be brought by force? Whose responsibility does a defeated country become after a war? Most of all: What role should America’s preeminent power play in shaping the answers? These questions hung in the air unanswered by the time the century turned. Soon the new administration in Washington would bring them all into focus, over Iraq.
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    BY 2000, the lame-duck President Clinton showed no sign of wanting to deal once and for all with a defiant Iraq. The Iraq Liberation Act was on the books but had never been in Clinton’s heart. Iraq became the neoconservatives’