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George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate was released October, 2005. The research and writing appears to have been completed shortly after the Jan 15, 2005 Iraq elections. Even so, it is the most up-to-date current history of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) that I’ve come across.

This is a journalist’s book, not a historian’s effort. So it is largely a collection of anecdotes - but special ones, enhanced by Packer’s insights. Of particular note to me was his long friendship with Kanan Makiya, which frames his account. Makiya, author of The Republic of Fear and Cruelty and Silence, is one of the most ethical of men, an Iraqi exile who made a significant impact on the thinking of many westerners. Certainly Makiya helped us understand the Stalinist character of Saddam’s tyranny, which was a major factor when we were weighing regime change.

While it is much too early to lay claim to truth on many issues, my bottom-line on the book is that Packer has strived for objectivity - and largely succeeded. I now have a better understanding of how the Phase IV mistakes came about. E.g., I did not know that it was as late as November 2004 that an appropriate strategy was finally developed to put the focus on the Iraqi security forces:

Kalev Sepp … went back to Iraq in November 2004 after a meeting in which General George Casey, Sanchez’s successor as commander, asked for his counterinsurgency expert and was met with dead silence: there was none. In Baghdad again, Sepp found that the U.S. military still didn’t have a viable campaign plan that addressed the insurgency in a serious way. With a team of American, British, and other officers, he helped design a new strategy that for the first time put the focus on the Iraqi security forces, with thousands of American advisers working intensively with the new battalions. . .

The ISF strategy is now working - but imagine how different Iraq would be today if implemented two years earlier. I still do not understand why Bush allowed the internal war between State and Defense to go on and on, while I do have a better grasp of what the confusion in Washington did to decision-making in Iraq.

And throughout, Packer strives to keep the Iraqis themselves in focus. From the epilogue, pg. 448:

When I told Aseel that, after the weapons turned out not to exist, some Americans felt betrayed by the Bush administration and Ahmad Chalabi, she exclaimed, “We are more important than missiles!” What the war gave people like her is hope.

MetaCritic.com references fifteen book reviews, nine with links to the full review text. For a very short review, I think Christopher Hitchens’ review for Publishers Weekly was to the point and reasonably objective:

It is extremely uncommon for any reporter to read another’s work and to find that he altogether recognizes the scene being described. Reading George Packer’s book, I found not only that I was remembering things I had forgotten, but also that I was finding things that I ought to have noticed myself. . .The Iraq debate has long needed someone who is both tough-minded enough, and sufficiently sensitive, to register all its complexities. In George Packer’s work, this need is answered.

I had hoped to gain some insights from the other fourteen reviews, but it was a challenge to relate what most of the reviewers wrote to the book I had just read, which reminded me of the following Packer quote [pg. 382]:

“Iraq provided a blank screen on which Americans were free to project anything they wanted. . .”

In this case the book serves as the “blank screen” as it gave the reviewers the opportunity to project their own anti-war sentiments. Newsweek’s editor Fareed Zakaria writing for the NYT was less slanted - even so, Zakaria introduced some of his own views that are not in Packer’s book (and are contrary to fact) such as “Friendly American firms like Halliburton were favored over local Iraqis”.

Personally, I think future historians will judge Bush harshly on his management of the post-conflict effort: achieving success in the end, but at far greater cost than necessary. For further pre-war analysis of the reconstruction requirements, see “Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario“, a February 2003 report originating from the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.

For a recent work on post-conflict strategy, see this U.S. Army War College Parameters review of “The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century“:

This is a stimulating–nay, provocative–book that should cause military readers and all associated with the security of the United States to question their fundamental assumptions. It is also a gutsy book because the author, a serving officer, asserts in effect that the Secretary of Defense, his team in the Pentagon, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are wrong in the way they seek to transform the nation’s armed forces and in the way they are fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He further contends that the United States stands a good chance of losing its wars in the future unless the forces confront the realities of warfare in this century.