George Packer Quotes
The Iraq war was always a long shot. But it was made immeasurably longer by its principal architects in Washington, including Douglas Feith, who ignored expert advice, reserved most of their effort for fighting each other in ideological battles, and regarded the Iraqi people as an afterthought.
Packer, George. The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Webb and others believe that President George W. Bush invaded Iraq, and unseated Saddam Hussein with no intention of leaving—that the plan was to establish a permanent American presence in the Middle East.
The “surge” was the short term injection of a large number of American combat troops into Iraq when the Iraq War was going badly. President George W. Bush, who at the urging of Vice President Cheney and the neoconservatives had invaded Iraq and while the invasion went well the administration botched the so-called peace and America was in the midst of a Iraqi civil war. Bush went ahead with the surge despite the advice of the Joint Chiefs. What makes the quotation particularly interesting, beyond the fact that the senior military advice was ignored, was that the President had always campaigned on the principle that the President should listen to the senior American Military officials on military tactics and strategy. He like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and other presidents found that the military leadership perspective was often very narrow and not even militarily infallible. The Iraq War turned in our favor after the surge albeit that there have been arguments since then as to whether or not the surge was the reason or was it due to other factors which occurred at the same time. Probably, all were factors.
George Packer is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of America from 1978 to 2012. In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His latest book Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century was released in May 2019.
