Free The Assassins' Gate by George Packer

United States and Iraq that’s become incestuous, incestuous,” Makiya said to me once during that decisive year 2002. “For eleven years it’s grown. A country of 250 million, the only superpower in the world, and this tin-pot little dictatorship by comparison (Iraq is no Germany), this nothing little country by contrast, is essentially at the center of world politics. It’s totally disproportionate. It’s completely bizarre. And they’re locked in this embrace that the first Gulf War created, and therefore it becomes natural for Iraqis now to see in the resolution of this incestuous relationship a future.”
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    WHY DID THE UNITED STATES invade Iraq? It still isn’t possible to be sure—and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War. Richard Haass said that he will go to his grave not knowing the answer. It was something that some people wanted to do. Before the invasion, Americans argued not just about whether a war should happen, but for what reasons it should happen—what the real motives of the Bush administration were and should be. Since the invasion, we have continued to argue, and we will go on arguing for years to come. Iraq is the Rashomon of wars.
    The answer has something to do with September 11. But what, exactly?
    The debate over Iraq began with the wounds of the terror attacks still open. Through the winter of 2002 into spring, while the blasted graveyard of city blocks downtown was cleared by excavation crews working twenty-four hours a day, I took part in endless conversations about how the world had and hadn’t changed. After years of trivial, bitterly partisan politics, September 11 had reopened large questions in a way that was both confusing and liberating. A natural response would be to fall back into familiar postures, and many people in America did this. But extraordinary times called for new thinking. Searching for a compass through the era just begun, I was drawn to people who thought boldly.
    One of them was the writer Paul Berman, who was working out a theory about what was now being called the war on terrorism. Some of his thinking took place aloud in the midnight hour over food and drink at a bistro in the Brooklyn neighborhood where we both lived. Berman, in his early fifties, lived alone in a walk-up apartment that was strewn with back issues of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review and volumes of French literature and philosophy in the original. He lived above a Palestinian grocery store half a block from Atlantic Avenue, where there was an established Middle Eastern community, with Syrian antiques shops and Yemeni restaurants and bookstores that carried Arabic literature, including the works of some of the great Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. After September 11, Berman explored the neighborhood bookstores and began to read the works of Sayyid Qutb, the leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who was hanged by Nasser in 1966. Qutb’s writings about Islam, the West, and global jihad inspired other Islamist thinkers, such as the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, who in turn inspired Osama bin Laden. (In the late eighties the U.S. headquarters of al-Qaeda’s predecessor organization, the Afghan Service Bureau, occupied a storefront at 566 Atlantic Avenue, next to a Moroccan textile shop; until they closed down after September 11, there were also radical mosques on Atlantic Avenue that followed the blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, spiritual leader of the worldwide jihad, who was convicted in 1995 of plotting to bomb New York’s bridges and tunnels.)
    Qutb’s ideas confirmed the theory that Berman had begun to develop, which was this: The young Arab men who had steered those four airplanes to apocalyptic death were not products of an alien world. They weren’t driven by Muslim tradition, or Third World poverty, or the clash of civilizations, or Western imperialism. They were modern,