The person who did that, discovered it was a failed dead end, and did it with such grace that we could all learn from it was George Packer, in his Assassin's Gate book. If you haven't taken a cut at it yet, I recommend it. Highly. As important as Ricks' Fiasco, but in a different way.
Packer bought Paul Berman's (not Bremer) vision of the equation between fundamentalist Islamism and fascism, as well as the notion that Saddam was a kind of fascist. That what was needed was a kind of campaign against authoritarianism in the mold of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus' books on the same.
He saw the Iraq invasion as a way to address that, guided, to some extent, by one of the Iraqi exiles, name escapes me as I type. Well known. Lectured at Harvard, Boston University, around the US.
For Packer, his book was a difficult retelling of an emotional journey as he came to realize that the Bush people just got it all wrong. |
