George Packer, long time writer for the New Yorker, was this year’s Carolyn Cockefair Benton Lecturer at UMKC. He spoke Thursday on “What is ISIS and Why Are We Back in Iraq?”
Much of his material came from his 2005 book, The Assassin’s Gate: America’s Role in Iraq.
Packer is an outspoken political liberal, once writing a non-fiction history of his family and how its fate was intertwined with the American liberal tradition over three generations, called “The Blood of the Liberals.”
As knowledgeable as he is about the Mid-East, everything gets filtered through a partisan prism, which is not surprising since his employer has become the chief theoretical organ of American liberalism, especially now that The New Republic has imploded.
The inevitable result is that everything is predictably couched in terms of DNC/MSNBC talking points.
Packer began his lecture by stating unequivocally that there was no reason for the U.S. to have gone into Iraq in the first place,unless it was out of an unsatisfied desire for revenge after 9-11, which made no sense since Iraq had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda.
One would never know from Packer’s statement to this effect that he had supported the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Continue reading
