Chapter One
Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………….ix
I. AFTER SEPTEMBER………………………………………………….11
Living Up to It…………………………………………………….3
Stop Making Sense…………………………………………………..18
On the Morning After Saddam………………………………………….23
A Democratic World………………………………………………….42
The Lesson of Tal Afar………………………………………………57
Knowing the Enemy…………………………………………………..92
Betrayed…………………………………………………………..114
Over Here………………………………………………………….153
The Children of Freetown…………………………………………….167
How Susie Bayer’s T-shirt Ended Up on Yusuf Mama’s Back…………………189
The Images in Our Heads……………………………………………..201
Gangsta War………………………………………………………..204
The Moderate Martyr…………………………………………………224
The Megacity……………………………………………………….243
Drowning…………………………………………………………..266
V. S. Naipaul’s Pursuit of Happiness………………………………….299
With Friends Like These……………………………………………..307
Graham Greene and the New Quiet Americans……………………………..317
The Spanish Prisoner………………………………………………..322
The Choice…………………………………………………………335
The Fall of Conservatism…………………………………………….353
The Hardest Vote……………………………………………………375
The New Liberalism………………………………………………….394
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………….411
Introduction
The decade covered by this collection of essays is actually seven years, from the morning of September 11, 2001, to the night of November 4, 2008. The margins of a historical period don’t conform to the turning of a new zero; eras are defined less precisely but more truly by events, a prevailing moral at mo sphere, what it felt like to live during a certain time. With just a little simplification, it’s possible to see from a distance that the thirties began on October 24, 1929, and ended on December 7, 1941; that the sixties began on November 22, 1963, and ended on-well, maybe on December 6, 1969 (the Altamont Speedway concert), or January 27, 1973 (the signing of the Paris Peace Accords), or August 9, 1974 (Nixon’s resignation). (“It is easy to see the beginnings of things,” Joan Didion wrote, “and harder to see the ends.”) Only a year on, is it too soon to define the period between the attacks on American soil and the election of Barack Obama as a distinct era? I’m going to anyway. It was the era of terror and of waste, when America, at the dizzying height of its powers, was given a chance to change the world in a new direction, failed miserably, and responded to the failure by changing itself. The era began with an unprecedented American tragedy; it ended, and a new era began, with one of those occasional moments of national renewal that have been among our saving graces.
These seven years, following an earlier time of domestic tranquillity and triviality, were crowded with drama: wars, suicide bombings, secret prisons, partisan combat, wild gyrations in the stock market, economic collapse, the disappearance of entire industries, political transformation. In retrospect, all this agitation had the quality of the various stages of some prolonged illness, during which the patient sweated, tossed, became delirious with visions incubated by a strange logic, spoke incomprehensibly, suffered delusions of possessing enormous strength, inflicted inadvertent pain on himself and others, collapsed and lay prostrate, and slowly began to recover. When I was in Baghdad in 2007, I had lunch in the Green Zone with an American official who said to me, “Do you think this is all going to seem like a dream? Is it just going to be a fever dream that we’ll wake up from and say, ‘We got into this crazy war, but now it’s over’?” It isn’t over, but now that the country has begun to emerge, we can look back and ask: What was it all about? Perhaps those seven years were the last spasm of the world’s greatest power at its apogee, the beginning of its slow decline. Perhaps they were a painful working out of certain malignancies that had been dormant within the country for years, while other malignancies erupted around the world. History confers on events the ex post facto aura of narrative coherence and inexorability-perhaps it was all accident and needless folly.
For most Americans, September 11 and all that it unleashed dominated the decade. This revealed, among other things, our besetting narcissism, the vice that leads us to imagine ourselves the best or the worst but at any rate the center of every thing. The shock of that morning can still be felt years later, but for an Iraqi or a Congolese the human loss on September 11 would have been, proportionate to population, an average day. It’s just that we hadn’t seen it coming and never felt so helpless before. I had erroneously and perhaps inappropriately hoped that the force of the blows would jolt America out of the long daydream of the Reagan and Clinton years, into a consciousness of responsibility at home and abroad. Things didn’t quite work out that way-America’s reputation sank to a fathomless global low. And yet, partly for this reason, the years right after the attacks saw a period of unusual openness to the world on the part of this most insular nation. Until we grew weary of the bad news and set up real and mental barriers to the world, Americans expressed a willingness to learn about other countries and to understand why so many people regarded us with ambivalence, if not outright fury. Oprah devoted a show to Islam, and the front page of The New York Times ran story after story, year after year, under unpronounceable headlines.
But because Americans do nothing in restrained measures, the news of the world was swallowed in great gulps, large quantities of it on the Web and cable networks as well as more established outlets, often without the help of background or context. The torrents of images from alien places pouring into the minds of Americans and everyone else, pictures of air strikes, beheadings, charred corpses, terrified children, elicited anguish and outrage but above all the consciousness of being unable to do anything about it. Too much information and not enough understanding or power: globalization and violence merged to create a particular kind of psychosis, with well-founded fears and judgments warped into paranoia and hallucination by nonstop media saturation. The world beyond your street was never closer, and never more out of reach.
The years after September 11 saw, strangely enough, a golden age of American journalism, a late-life flowering even as the traditional news business was dying thanks to the Internet. Not in Washington-where the press covered the Bush presidency the way it’s covered politics for the past several decades, as entertainment and sports, even when the story was as serious as war and a corps of insiders with high-level access failed to see what was under their noses-but in Jalalabad and Jeddah and Falluja. During these years, the curiosity of readers and generosity of editors allowed me to travel to foreign places that ordinarily didn’t show up on the map of the American media, and to devote considerable time, resources, and words to conveying the stories of their obscure inhabitants as something more than exotica or horror show. Long-form narrative journalism, that luxury of an earlier, slower time, like the three-volume novel or the three-martini lunch, turned out to be the means by which much of the reading public at the start of the twenty-first century started to understand what had been done to America and what America was doing in return. On the surface, all was chaos and violence-if causes and truths lay anywhere, they were down below. And now that the country is pulling inward again, to its habitual focus on its own concerns, we may soon look back at the period after September 11 as a rare moment when Americans became interested in people other than themselves.
The center of my journalistic world during these years was Iraq. I began writing about the coming war in the months before it began, made six trips to Iraq after the invasion, and only stopped thinking obsessively about it after most of my Iraqi friends had left the country in 2007 and 2008. But there’s a gap in this collection between the start of the war and its later years, a period covered by reporting that is not included here because it became the basis for The Assassins’ Gate, my book about Iraq. The reader expecting a continuous, if fragmentary, chronicle will find instead a sudden jump from nail-biting pre-war forecasts to grim late-war reporting. The discontinuity highlights certain changes in my thinking and writing that came with the war.
The past decade was as intensely ideological as the 1930s. After September 11, it seemed to me necessary not just to understand the worldview that had turned passenger planes into missiles, but to answer its mental force with a counterforce. The conservative administration in Washington mustered its own very quickly and assertively: it was nationalistic, militaristic, and almost religiously certain. My political inclinations pointed in a different, though not an opposite, direction. The interventions and failures to intervene of the 1990s had shown that, in certain circumstances, America could be an instrument-often of last resort-for good in the world, and that liberalism’s problem was too much hesitation in the face of this possibility, not too little. I wrote several essays after September 11 in the belief that more was required in the wake of the Islamist assault and the conservative reaction than just liberal criticism.
Today, the ambition of these essays makes me a little uneasy-something in the tone and language no longer sits well. There’s a tendency toward overreach, driven by uncertainty more than overconfidence, and by an unreliable excitement in the thick of world-historical events. After a few trips to Iraq, words like “democracy” and “totalitarianism,” appeals to grand ideological struggles, and comparisons with the Cold War began to sound a little too glib. The analysis was still relevant and, in a sense, intellectually justified, but it did not tell you what to do or how to do it, and in the case of Iraq-a war I supported, for reasons that had more to do with strong emotions than global strategy-it gave the wrong answer. Abstractions and sweeping statements suddenly seemed dangerous. “Ideas scare me. They get people killed,” Dexter Filkins of the Times, who has seen as much of the latter as any journalist, said when we met in Baghdad.
One alternative to intellectual journalism is reportage that approaches pointillism: the patient accretion of local knowledge, building story upon story one fact at a time, while restraining the impulse to generalize, with the awareness that the subject is too complex, maybe even unknowable, for any kind of summary judgment. For a while my pieces from Iraq, under the chastening influence of experience, moved in this direction. But answering bad or misleading ideas with no ideas at all is hardly satisfying. The war in Iraq introduced me to new ideas about war, developed by dissidents inside the government and military; but the theories they propose are closer to the ground than philosophy or ideology, less intellectually stimulating but better informed and more strategically useful.
My ambition as a journalist is always to combine narrative writing with political thought. Finding the balance is a continuous struggle, but each needs the other and is poorer without it.
The ideological battles of the past decade left out large swaths of the globe. The poor countries of the Southern Hemisphere, where religion is a way of life and not a political weapon, had begun to push their way into the consciousness of enlightened people in wealthy countries during the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War lifted the ideological shadow of the two superpowers. Without the American-Soviet rivalry to consume the world’s attention and resources, these trouble spots, plagued by poverty, mass killing, disease, and tyranny, became the object of a kind of consensus on the part of humanitarians: outsiders had a moral interest in what went on inside distant borders and an obligation to ameliorate it. In certain circumstances, this obligation even came at the expense of national sovereignty, for in the post-Cold War world, as an awareness of the contagious effects of local problems grew, borders became less sacrosanct and sometimes disappeared right off the map. Like any new idea, this humanitarian consensus was extremely controversial in practice and the source of a great deal of hypocrisy and evasion. But double standards and violated standards are better than no standards at all; desperate people don’t care very much about the moral consistency of people who are not desperate. At the very least, worldwide media made it harder to ignore what was happening to small boys in Sierra Leone and teenage girls in Cambodia.
But after September 11, American foreign policy once again divided the world into ideological camps, and neither Ivory Coast nor Burma fit into one. Traveling through Africa and Southeast Asia during these years, I heard a number of people crack the same bleak joke: that their country’s obvious problem was a lack of terrorists. If a suicide bomber blew himself up next to an appropriate target, media attention and development money and other lifelines would flow their way. For even when the outside world wasn’t thinking about them, people in these forgotten places were acutely aware of the outside world. In a town near Ivory Coast’s border with Liberia, I saw a drunken young rebel fighter in a T-shirt showing the faces of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, like the stars of an action film, side by side, as if to say: Don’t make me choose-I’m with the guy who wins. In Rangoon, a dissident artist earnestly explained to me that a single well-placed American bomb dropped on Burma’s remote new capital could make up for all the harm done by all the bombs in Iraq.
The inhabitants of countries like these find themselves in a situation of existential absurdity. From the global media we know something about their plight-occasionally enough to want to act and alleviate it. And from the same global media they know something about us, too, enough to borrow freely-the fighters on both sides of the civil war in Ivory Coast styled themselves after American gangsta rappers, while people all over Africa dress themselves in our castoff clothing. But the information never leads to meaningful action. From across this great gulf we look at them, and they look at us, and nothing happens. A French scholar in Abidjan had a phrase for the condition of young people there: lèche-vitrines. The closest they can come to matching their aspirations with possibility is window-shopping. In this context, the Internet and satellite television become torments.
When the Iraq War began, Ivorians demonstrated in their capital for America to invade their country, too, and end French interference in their civil war (that week I happened to be in the only country on earth where the invasion of Iraq was wildly popular). The coincidence of these events contained an irony that became clear only later: the idea of outside rescue perished in Iraq. The humanitarian consensus of the 1990s collapsed after it was invoked to justify the most controversial war in recent history-to the great benefit of Robert Mugabe, Omar al-Bashir, and Than Shwe. After Iraq, the burden of working out their own destiny falls more and more on young people living under tyranny in Burma, on self-employed Nigerians scavenging a living in the thronged streets of Lagos. The West, with its staggering abundance, its music and images, and its freedoms, remains a model and a temptation. But the sense that a quick and simple answer to human misery lies somewhere out there no longer holds many people on either side of the gulf under its spell. If this is a case of wising up, it’s also a sign of atrophied imaginations.
To some degree, almost every essay in this collection deals with the problem of idealism. Why is it a problem? Because, whether on the scale of individuals or nations, good intentions prompt actions that always lead to unintended consequences. Because, for all our saturation in media, we never really know enough until, one way or another, it’s too late. Because, as Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination, “Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination.” The corruption that begins in enlightenment and ends in force is a particularly American one, and the era of terror was rotten with it, producing along the way innumerable critics, internal and external, of American self-righteousness. They are all in one way or another descendants of Graham Greene, who identified the original sin of innocence at the start of the American war in Vietnam. When a new movie version of The Quiet American was released just before the Iraq War, Greene’s ghost stirred and spoke as a new generation of Americans apparently headed down another road to hell.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Interesting Times
by George Packer
Copyright © 2009 by George Packer.
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ISBN: 978-0-374-17572-6
