The Assassins' Gate by George Packer

leading cause because the Clinton policy of sanctions and occasional missile attacks seemed to be failing, but for a larger reason, too: They saw Iraq as the test case for their ideas about American power and world leadership. Iraq represented the worst failure of the nineties and the first opportunity of the new American century. In the middle of the 2000 presidential campaign, Kagan and Kristol published a warning shot in the form of an essay collection pointedly, and perhaps nostalgically, called Present Dangers. It was a book-length exposition of the themes of their earlier articles, and the contributors included many of the leading figures in what was becoming a critical mass of hawkish foreign-policy opinion. Richard Perle’s essay dripped scorn, claiming that Clinton’s December 1998 bombing of Iraqi installations, widely ridiculed as a “wag the dog” distraction in the middle of impeachment hearings, “had no lasting effect” (an assertion that was refuted after the invasion by the Iraq Survey Group, which found that the missile strikes had helped to finish off what was left of Saddam’s chemical weapons facilities). Without mentioning his friend Ahmad Chalabi by name, Perle proposed the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Chalabi, as the crowbar with which America could pry Iraq free from Saddam’s grip. Finally, Perle broke the last taboo and broached the possibility of a U.S. military role: “As a last resort … we should build up our own ground forces in the region so that we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq.”
    Paul Wolfowitz’s essay was far more judicious, an on-the-other-hand attempt to apply principles learned during the Cold War to the new world, with its many new dangers. Though this ex-Democrat was as contemptuous of the Democrats as the book’s other essayists, Wolfowitz seemed in no mood to assert America’s benevolent hegemony across the globe. He even glanced back worriedly at the trauma that had made so many liberals into pacifists. “We cannot ignore the uncomfortable fact that economic and social circumstances may better prepare some countries for democracy than others,” wrote Wolfowitz, who had served a stint as a widely admired ambassador to Indonesia (most of the other neoconservatives had spent their entire careers in Washington). “Oddly, we seem to have forgotten what Vietnam should have taught us about the limitations of the military as an instrument of ‘nation-building.’ Promoting democracy requires attention to specific circumstances and to the limitations of U.S. leverage. Both because of what the United States is, and because of what is possible, we cannot engage either in promoting democracy or in nation-building as an exercise of will. We must proceed by interaction and indirection, not imposition. In this respect, post–World War II experiences with Germany and Japan offer misleading guides to what is possible now, even in a period of American primacy.”
    Thus Paul Wolfowitz in the year 2000—sounding like a prudent expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—the same man who within a few years would acquire the epithet “Wolfowitz of Arabia” after unlearning in Iraq everything quoted above. There are no pure ideas and straight lines in the history of great events. When policy makers change their views, “Usually it’s because circumstances change,” Kagan told me, “or they got insulted by somebody in power.” In Wolfowitz’s case, he might have been angling for a job in the administration of the leading Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, whom he served as a foreign-policy adviser during the campaign and who made it clear that crusades to transform the world after America’s image were not going to be his thing. Bush’s guide to the world