Low Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Just finished George Packer's The Assassin's Gate. Wonderfully well reported and well told account of the Iraqi Freedom. Watching Packer (an admitted hawk at the beginning of the book) lose faith in the war and become angry at it's architects is both fascinating and heartbreaking, because he, as we all do, wants the country to do well and succeed in all it's ventures (whether we support them or not). But he cannot stomach the caviler and ridiculously optimistic way that the war was approached.

It's late, and I've had some wine, but I'm gonna transcribe two sections, because I thought they were illuminating. If you've got some time to kill in a Barnes and Noble, the "Memorial Day" chapter is one of the best. These two are from there:

One of Bush's advisers once explained to the journalist Ron Suskind the worldview of the White House. Whereas the nation-building experts and the war critics and Ron Suskind lived "in what we call the reality-based community" where people "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality," unfortunately, "that's not the way the world really works anymore." The way the world now works amounted to a repudiation of reason, skeptical intelligence, the whole slate of liberal Enlightenment values. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors," the aide concluded, "and you, all of you, will be left just to study what we do."

After reading that on the train, I literally had to put the book away for a while.

One month after he survived the bombing in Baghdad, I met Ghassan Salame, the late Sergio Vieiera de Mello's political advisor, in the lobby of the UN headquarters in New York. Looking a little wan, Salame said, "Iraq needs to be liberated -- liberated from big plans. Every time people mentioned it in the last few years, it was to connect it to big ideas: the war against WMDs, solving the Arab-Isreali conflict, more recently the war against terrorism and a model of democracy. That why all these mistakes are made. They're made because Iraq is always in someone's mind the first step to something else."