The Assassins' Gate by George Packer Page A

could be found in a Foreign Affairs article—not Kagan’s and Kristol’s from 1996 but an essay in the January 2000 issue by the provost of Stanford University, Condoleezza Rice, which called for a return to the great-power realism of Nixon, Kissinger, and Bush’s father.
    But after the disputed election, when the younger Bush’s national-security team began to take shape, one found sprinkled throughout the government the names of neoconservatives who knew one another from years in and out of power, and whose ideas for the post–Cold War world had come into focus during the nineties: Wolfowitz, Eeith, Wurmser, Shulsky, Stephen Cambone, and others at the Pentagon; Wolfowitz’s former aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, John Hannah, and William J. Luti in Vice President Cheney’s office; Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Zalmay Khalilzad on the National Security Council; John Bolton at State; Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and R. James Woolsey on the advisory Defense Policy Board. Their patrons were Cheney and the new secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was a hard-edged old Cold Warrior, an aggressive nationalist. Cheney, Rumsfeld’s protégé, colleague, and pal through several administrations, came from the same stock.
    Many of these officials had served at the middle levels under Reagan, embracing his hawkish idealism. The fall of communism and the emergence of the United States as the world’s only superpower had given them a sense of historical victory. Then they had spent the nineties watching the first Bush administration return to narrow realism and the Clinton administration founder from crisis to crisis, squandering Reagan’s triumph. They had made their long march through the think tanks and policy journals, honing their ideas and perfecting their attacks. Now they were coming back to power as insurgents, scornful of the entrenched bureaucracy, the more cautious moderates in their own party (including the new secretary of state, Colin Powell), and the tired, defeated Democrats. They were supremely confident; all they needed was a mission.
    I asked Robert Kagan how his ideas had traveled from the pages of Commentary to the foreign-policy apparatus of the Bush administration. He waved me off. It didn’t work that way, he said. “September 11 is the turning point. Not anything else. This is not what Bush was on September 10.”
    The ideas of the neoconservatives had nothing to do with it?
    Kagan sighed. “Here’s what I’m willing to say. Did we keep alive a certain way of looking at American foreign policy at a time when it was pretty unpopular? Yes. I think probably you need to have people do that so that you have something to come back to. And, in a way, then you have a ready-made approach to the world.”

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    IN THE SPRING of 2002, I met Kanan Makiya for one of our irregular coffees in a Harvard Square basement café. By then I’d moved from Cambridge to New York, where on the morning of September 11, 2001, I rushed down Fifth Avenue against the current of ash-covered men and women who were streaming uptown from the place where the World Trade Center towers had been, and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in an exodus of red-faced workers as smoke and dust poured into the sky.
    Six months and one war in Afghanistan later, Makiya was talking about another war, this one in Iraq. It would be the war he had called for, to no avail, back in 1991—a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
    As early as January 2001, at the new administration’s first national security meeting, officials floated plans to the freshly sworn-in president for the removal of Saddam, in accord with the largely symbolic Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (though this would emerge only three years later, in an insider’s account by Bush’s first, short-lived treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill). In April, at the administration’s first