Free Republic

<p>President Joe Biden once dismissed America’s obligations to Afghan women and girls when he was vice president, telling officials “Fuck that” when it was brought to his attention.</p><p>Atlantic reporter George Packer, also a biographer of former President Barack Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, revealed the 2010 exchange in March.</p>

You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none. The access to Richard Holbrooke’s papers and to the...

I like to think that the last thoughts of Haynes Johnson were happy ones. Johnson, a longtime reporter for the Washington Post and the author of many sweeping books about American life in toto, died in late May. Days later came the publication of a new book by George Packer, a writer for the New Yorker, called The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. The new book has the trademark Johnsonian (Haynes, not Dr.) sweep, embodies the same Johnsonian ambition to force Americans to face the unpleasant truth about themselves. We can hope that Haynes moved on to...

Tuesday, December 20, 2005 Assassinating the truth about the Iraq war By Michael RubinCommentary by   "The story of the Iraq war is a story of ideas about the role of the United States in the world, and of the individuals who conceived and acted on them." This is the view of George Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, in the preface to his much publicized recent book "The Assassins' Gate," an account of the planning and personalities involved in the Iraq war. Packer seeks to explore U.S. involvement in Iraq through encounters with its participants, American...

It's time to come to the defense of Judith Miller. Yes, the former New York Times reporter served as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration during the buildup to the Iraq War. And she certainly had a dubious role in the Plamegate scandal. But the way her colleagues have been going after her, you'd think Miller was the only journalist who abetted the Bush administration's rush to war. Or that she was the only reporter who got too cozy with officials when they maliciously leaked a CIA agent's identity. There are lots of them. Just last week, another war accomplice,...