Kurdish refugees from the surrounding villages told me that Sunni guerillas operate checkpoints on all the back roads. “They kill Kurds who are with any of the political parties,” explained a woman who recently left a mixed village for the safety of an all-Kurdish town further west along the road from Mosul to Arbil. A refugee from Kirkuk on his way to Turkey told me that armed Kurds took his brother’s home and shop. Forty-five minutes back up the road, in the safe Kurdish capital of Arbil, a successful local businessman, Shiek Zana, was arrested and revealed to be the head of an Islamic terrorist cell engaged in kidnapping and murder. Even the parts of Iraq that are not wracked by constant car bombs and assassinations are frequently ruled by fear, corruption, and the threat of mayhem.

Pull back from this complex local matrix of war, crime, religion, and ethnicity and the problem takes on even more horrible dimensions. In Mesopotamia we see the gears of history working in real time, and the crisis has unfolded in the form of an almost Shakespearean tragedy. Witness the familiar characters and plot arc: the father, the son, the great power, the villain, the vendetta, the initial victory and hubris, and then the inevitable disintegration. Under US occupation, Iraq has sunk into a quagmire of civil war, theocracy, corruption, and poverty. There is no American exit strategy, yet US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claims to have “a victory strategy.” Nor is there any realistic plan to rebuild Iraq. This, despite the evident ravages of Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran, its internal civil wars among the Sunni, Shiites, and Kurds, the first war with the American-led coalition, the crippling twelve-year regimen of economic sanctions, and finally the bombing, looting, and chaos of the current war and occupation.

Three titles stand out from a large crop of recent books by prominent journalists, all describing and analyzing the US misadventure in Iraq. Given the rapidly deteriorating conditions in Iraq’s cities, much of the detailed, on-the-ground reporting in these books would be impossible today: Iraq has become a black hole.

George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq may be the least compelling of the three books, but it attempts something important: to marry cogent, personal reporting with a broader theory of the war’s origins. For Packer, the only legitimate motives for the war are moral—to liberate a people from a brutal despotic regime and to aide in the creation of a democracy. “The only justification for the war left standing, in my view, ” Packer writes late in the book, “was the creation of a government that would give Iraqis the better lives they deserved. It would have to be democratic, but it would have to fill in the bare forms of democracy with substance.” Like a number of other intellectuals who supported the war, Packer subscribed to a liberalism that allowed him to overlook the warning signs of disaster and to believe that the Bush administration, though motivated by interests that had nothing to do with the well-being of Iraqis, could inadvertently liberate 26 million people, many of whom were persecuted under Saddam Hussein. In retrospect, this was naive and even irresponsible, and Packer finally learned as much when he went to Iraq and saw first-hand how the occupation was being mismanaged and how ordinary Iraqis were suffering as a result.

It is in the first third of Assassins’ Gate that Packer, a self-described “liberal hawk,” tangles with the ideas that made him support the war. He provides a series of mini-bios of some of the war’s intellectual apologists, men like Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, and most of all the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya—the author of two important books on Iraq, Republic of Fear and Cruelty and Silence. Both books made the case against Saddam and catalogued his despotism in gruesome detail. Eventually, as the US invasion draws near, Makiya makes the transformation from lone dissident to counsellor of the war party. He offers Bush’s inner circle wildly optimistic opinions about what will and will not happen in a US-occupied Iraq, claiming that Iraqis will “greet the troops with sweets and flowers.”

Though Packer dislikes the Bush administration’s politics, as well as the more feverish messianic visions erupting from the neo-conservative think tanks in Washington, he is drawn to the power of ideas and the hope that liberal democracy might take root in the Middle East. As part of the US- government-funded network of Iraqi exile groups, Makiya created a detailed blueprint for Iraq’s transformation from dictatorship to democracy. “It’s the architect in me,” Makiya, who was trained as an architect, tells Packer at one point. “Architects are such megalomaniacs.” Paraphrasing Christoper Hitchens on Washington’s neo-conservatives, Packer thinks: “It was also the ex-Trotskyist in him. For somewhere in the cortex of Kanan Makiya—not deeply buried, either—was the name of Leon Trotsky, and alongside it the Trotskyist idea of an intellectual vanguard leading from the front, forcing history to move in the desired direction.”

All of this is very inspiring, or very dangerous, depending on how you feel about utopian ideas backed by force of arms. As the war of ideas is replaced by the real war of fire, blood, gore, and heartbreak, things go terribly wrong in Mesopotamia. When Packer sets out to look around, confronted by mounting evidence of disaster, he bravely begins to change his mind. “Iraq needs to be liberated—liberated from big plans,” says Ghassan Salamé, the political adviser to the late UN Special Representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed in a suicide bombing in Baghdad in 2003. “Every time people mentioned it in the last few years, it was to connect it to big ideas: the war against wmds, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, more recently the war against terrorism and a model of democracy....[Mistakes are] made because Iraq is always in someone’s mind the first step to something else.” Ultimately, when all Packer’s justifications and big ideas are rehashed and all the chaos-induced hand-wringing is done, one suspects that Packer was simply seduced by the glory of being right, and by the potently macho hold that war has upon the male imagination. Other people did not need to give war a chance. They did not need to see for themselves to know that war is a miserable thing. Those who opposed the Iraq war before it happened read history and understood the politics of the Bush administration; they correctly concluded that this invasion was based on lies and bound to be bad both for the people of Iraq as well as for the US troops sent to enforce the new order.

Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near bores deeply inside the Iraq disaster to produce an intimate and painful portrait. Based on his reporting for the Washington Post, Shadid’s book is quiet and politically restrained. He tells the story of the slow political, physical, and psychological disintegration of a nation under occupation. The book covers Iraq from before the invasion, when the mood was a mixture of fear and hopeful anticipation, through the war, and into the occupation’s rapid decline.

If there is a core theme in Shadid’s book, it is contradiction. As Shadid portrays it, everyday life in Iraq is fraught with contradictions. Amal, a young Shiite and Baathist, kept a wartime diary that was uncritically “infused with the government’s propaganda...[believed] with the force of a loyalist,” Shadid reports. After Saddam fell, Amal held to her loyalty, but “privately Amal seemed baffled, and she gave voice to her confusion in the diary. A war she had dreaded was over and a revolution she did not understand was just beginning; she tried to reconcile her experience with reality, as churning, unpredictable, and menacing as it was. Just as she questioned her views of the US soldiers, she began to reconsider her beliefs about Saddam.” Amal writes that, “her community used to have trust in President Saddam...but now we don’t know whom we trust.”

These deep cultural and psychological contradictions, produced by decades of despotism and perpetual war, and now the chaos of occupation, are essential components of modern Iraqi culture. While reporting in Iraq over the last three years, I have been repeatedly struck by the prevalence of just this sort of cognitive dissonance among regular people. Iraqis who hated Saddam in August 2003 cried when he was captured four months later. One woman told me she didn’t like Saddam but cried because she identified with him, and identified him with the Iraqi nation. Totalitarian regimes normalize atrocities and compartmentalize thought in ways that seem to make sense to those they oppress. This strange dynamic, so aptly captured by Shadid, is almost completely lost on the many armchair pundits fighting on the West’s intellectual front.