Assassin's Gate, PART I

After reading so much about George Packer's book Assassin's Gate I decided to get a copy for myself. I'm about halfway through, and it's a lot of information to amass. The beginning of the book is full of the kind of stuff that particularly gets former politics majors excited, and that's the political motivations that lead leaders into whatever spots they get themselves into.

AG talks a lot about the extent to which the Bush Administration was influenced my the writings of Leo Strauss, and there's some focus given to an essay by Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt called "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence."

As biased as I would like to be, I keep trying to be objective (and, of course, reminding myself that if even half of what's in Packer's book is true, the Iraq war is still patently outrageous) and since I've not read the book all the way through or done much work looking for corraborating sources, I am going to defer to the excellent discussion of Shulsky and Schmitt's paper that's going on in the Blog Sic Semper Tyrannis

I will go so far as to say that I do truly hope that our decision to invade Iraq was based on more than this paper, which reads to me more like throat-clearing than foreign policy.