Free The Assassins' Gate by George Packer Page B

suicide attacks in Jerusalem and bin Laden’s latest communiqué from the mountains of the Hindu Kush. I listened, occasionally asking a skeptical question, admiring the dedication of his project (who else was really trying to figure this stuff out?), mostly sympathizing—but also worrying about Berman’s tendency toward sweeping, distinction-erasing intellectual moves. What, for example, did his theory have to do with Iraq?
    It wasn’t hard to see that the Arab Baath Socialist Party in Baghdad was totalitarian. Makiya had shown this in his Republic of Fear. The regime held power through a cult of leader worship, pervasive terror created by endless acts of astonishing violence against its own citizens, overlapping and ubiquitous security agencies, continuous wars of aggression, and a climate of conspiratorial thinking and paranoia toward the Zionist and imperialist enemies. Saddam seemed to have modeled his regime on Orwell’s 1984, right down to Big Brother’s mustache. His hero was Stalin, whom Saddam, more than any other of the world’s dictators, resembled. The founder of the Baath Party in Damascus in the early 1940s, Michel Aflaq (whose tomb is in Baghdad), was deeply influenced by Nazi ideology. But Baathism—like its European progenitors—was nominally secular. It was hostile to Islamist regimes and ideologies. It was also visibly in decay. The days of its ability to move masses of people to frenzies of hatred and violence were over. Then why go to war with Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda?
    Berman answered: because Baathism was one of the “Muslim totalitarianisms,” the other being Islamism. The terror war was not just a police action or a military campaign. Like the war against fascism and the Cold War, it was an ideological war, a “mental war.” Victory required that millions of people across the Muslim world give up murderous political ideas. It would be a long, hard, complicated business. But the overthrow of Saddam and the establishment of an Iraqi democracy as a beachhead in the Middle East would show that the United States was on the side of liberal-minded Arabs like Kanan Makiya and against the totalitarians and their ideas. Regime change would show that we, too, were capable of fighting for an idea—the idea of freedom. The willingness of liberal democracy to defend itself and fight for its principles is always in doubt. Alexis de Tocqueville worried about it; Hitler and Mussolini scoffed at it; so, more recently, did bin Laden. But the greatest affirmation of this willingness was made by Lincoln at Gettysburg, where he vowed that a nation (and not only his own—any nation) “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could long endure.
    This was not the kind of thinking that gets one invited to join the Council on Foreign Relations. Berman wasn’t particularly interested in military strategy or policy issues. The answers to September 11 were just as likely to be found in Dostoyevsky and Camus as at the Brookings Institution or in the pages of Foreign Affairs. He was responding viscerally to the event (our late-night talks kept coming back to the scale of destruction just across the East River, shocking evidence of the Islamists’ ambition) and also at an extremely high altitude of abstraction, where details become specks.
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    THE YEAR AND A HALF BETWEEN the terror attacks and the invasion of Iraq was crowded with large, aggressive ideas. Like the liberal revolutions of 1848, or the Bolshevik surge of 1917, or the utopian spring of 1968, September 11 gave political intellectuals plenty of work. Throughout 2002, as the Bush administration pursued its course of inevitable confrontation with Saddam, at the same time, outside the walls of power, there rose a clamor of arguments about the coming war, the nature of the enemy, the role of America in the world. Ideas