Current Affairs: Two books examine the changes in world politics in the context of the war in Iraq.
September 11th, 2001, was not the only catalyst for change in the rules that govern international relations. By the end of the 1990s the world had already changed; old ideas about the limits and possibilities of action in the international order were already being re-evaluated in the context of the new world of American hegemony.
In the debates that accompanied the military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, cherished positions were re-examined. Idealists found common cause with realists, doves began to look like hawks, and pacifists confronted a new argument to challenge their moral position. "Humanitarian intervention" was the name of the game after the end of the Cold War. No longer could the boundaries of the state set the limits of moral obligation on the part of the "international community" as we called it then - a phrase which rang true and righteous at the time, but now seems vacuous, out of tune with the temper of post-Iraq politics.
The liberal hawks, as they were called, who rallied to the cause of tough, military intervention in Kosovo, felt vindicated by the precision and speed of the NATO victory. They included such noted journalists and academics as Fareed Zakaria, Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens - and George Packer, the journalist author of The Assassins' Gate.
The western experience in Bosnia, the confidence in military technology after Kosovo, and the absence of the blanket veto on military intervention previously imposed by the Cold War assured them that the international community would rally to the cause of good against any further manifestation of evil which presented itself. When it came, in September 2001, the new humanitarian impulse to impose peace and a measure of justice by military force had found its acid test.
But while liberal hawks in Europe and the US were struggling to assimilate the unfamiliar strategies and grammar of war to their more humane tradition of thought, in Washington a different range of purposes was setting the agenda. As George Packer shows in this frank and fascinating commentary on the war and its aftermath in Iraq, liberals like himself were betrayed into lending support to a military adventure conceived by neoconservatives in the early 1990s and born of the opportunity afforded by the 2001 bombing of the Twin Towers.
Packer relates candidly how he and other liberal supporters of the war were misled not just by the fabrications of government but by the false hopes and wildly optimistic predictions of success which proliferated among Iraqi exiles - who were encouraged, and in part financed, by the plotters of neoconservativism who had the full support of the president.
Most prominent among them was Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, who had long believed that Saddam Hussein was an obstacle to the grand reordering of the Middle East in the interests of American dominance and of security for Israel. "They were supremely confident," Packer writes of Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, among others in the cabal of new imperialists, "all they needed was a mission."
And they got their green light - their Pearl Harbor, as they disarmingly called it - when Islamic extremists struck the World Trade Centre. After 9/11, the search began among many Americans, including liberals, for a use of the nation's power that mixed force with idealism and promised to reorder the Middle East. In the White House, the blueprint was already on the president's desk. Packer provides page after page of vivid description of the haphazard, poorly planned and almost criminally incompetent occupation of Iraq, revealing for him the staggering gap between the abstract ideas of the neocons and the concrete reality of suffering Iraqis.
The story of how an imperial strategy for American influence in the Middle East was plotted and drafted by a few likeminded conservatives and presented triumphantly to President Bush as the response to September 11th has been retold and rehashed to distraction. Packer has little of substance to add to this story in his first few chapters, but he nonetheless sustains interest throughout by his lucid prose and his eye for the apt illustration. Richard Perle, we learn, dated the daughter of Albert Wohlstetter - a famous conservative theorist of the Cold War - an event in Los Angeles which somehow led to Perle's induction into the shadowy company of Paul Wolfowitz in Chicago and to Perle's fateful introduction to an Iraqi exile named Ahmad Chalabi.
It was Perle who convinced George Bush and his close advisers of his fail-safe plan to topple Saddam when the time was ripe. "Put Ahmad Chalabi at the head of an army of Iraqi insurgents and back him with American military power and cash."
Packer found himself too easily persuaded by the hopes and pleadings of Iraqi exiles. This might not be a war justified by the official case for weapons of mass destruction. But the liberal hawk view that he clung to tenaciously with Ignatieff and others was more influenced by the stories and hopes of the Iraqi people and the humanitarian interest in liberating them from a tyrant than by the spurious arguments of government. "This war was always winnable," he says, angrily, "it still is. For this very reason the recklessness of its authors is hard to forgive."
To recklessness he must add a cynical disregard for the welfare of Iraqis after the administration of shock and awe had silenced Saddam and his Revolutionary Guard. When Lieutenant General Jay Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer and was summoned to a White House meeting of the president, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice, no one showed any interest in the post-war state of Iraq. At the end of the meeting, Packer tells us, President Bush asked Garner: "You want to do Iran for the next one?" Garner replied "No sir, me and the boys are holding out for Cuba". It was a joke, Packer assures us. (Is he sure?)
No one embraced the new humanitarianism more enthusiastically than the man who would renew British politics, inventing New Labour to do it, and who in better days saw Britain (and himself) at the heart of a rejuvenated European Union. Tony Blair is the subject of a book of collected essays which first appeared in the London Review of Books, and are here repackaged under the heading of David Runciman's polemical essay The Politics of Good Intentions.
Runciman's account of the genius and hypocrisy of Blair, of the mix of moral courage and madness which drove Blair to ignore the opinion of his people and colleagues and to cast his lot in with Dubbya in the White House makes this book a useful counterpoint to Packer. Together Blair and Bush bear responsibility for a disastrous war and a sinister shift in the tone of politics from the humanitarian idealism of the late 1990s to the fear and the erosion of liberty which is their legacy to their own people and beyond.
The world has changed, the old rules no longer apply, as Blair and Bush keep telling us, warning us to be vigilant and fearful as they guide us through the pitfalls of the new age of terror. But this odd couple, these unlikely buddies, are as much the agent of that change as the heroic leaders who confront it on our behalf.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq By George Packer Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 467pp. £12.99
The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order By David Runciman Princeton University Press, 211pp. £18.95