George Packer
Staff Writer
The New Yorker

Citation
Twenty years from now, students looking for a definitive account of the troubled aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq will no doubt turn to George Packer’s deeply reported 20,000-word piece in The New Yorker. Packer weaves the stories of individual Iraqis and Americans into a compelling narrative that provides readers with a wide-angle view of the situation in Iraq. His ability to get Iraqi civilians and American soldiers to open up to him and reveal their doubts and fears about the U.S. occupation makes his piece all the more riveting. Packer’s story is also notable for its reporting on how the Bush administration failed to adequately prepare for the problems that surfaced in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. In pulling together many different strands of postwar Iraq, Packer provided an important service to Americans struggling to make sense of tumultuous times.

Excerpt
War After The War
November 24, 2003
An infantry captain in Baghdad gave me his war log for the months of March, April, and May. The days leading up to the city’s fall are crowded with incidents. But immediately after April 9th, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down, the entries turn brief: “Nothing significant to report, stayed at airport all day doing maintenance and recovery operations.” Meanwhile, the city’s leading institutions were being plundered…
The economic cost of the looting was estimated at twelve billion dollars. The ruined buildings, the lost equipment, the destroyed records, and the damaged infrastructure continue to hamper the reconstruction. But on a more profound level, the looting meant that Iraqis’ first experience of freedom was disorder and violence. The arrival of the Americans therefore unleashed new fears, even as it brought an end to political terror…
Iraqis, who had been taught by Saddam that individual initiative could be fatal, were waiting to be told what would come next; and no one told them. Many reacted to the vacuum with a kind of paralysis. “People just stopped doing everything they would normally do,” an ORHA official recalled. In late April, a man in a Shia neighborhood approached Noah Feldman, a law professor at New York University, who had come to Iraq as a constitutional adviser, and asked him who was in charge. Nobody seemed to know.
“We were incompetent, as far as they were concerned,” Feldman said. “The key to it all was the looting. That was when it was clear that there was no order. There’s an Arab proverb: Better forty years of oppression than one day of anarchy.” He added, “That also told them they could fight against us—that we were not a serious force.”

Biography
George Packer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since May 2003. In addition to his coverage of Iraq, he has written on the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast, and the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel. Packer was awarded two Overseas Press Club awards for his work in 2003, one for his Iraq coverage and the other for his reporting on the civil war in Sierra Leone. Packer, a 2001-2002 Guggenheim Fellow, has contributed articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature to The New York Times Magazine, Dissent, Mother Jones, Harper's, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Columbia. Packer is the author of “The Village of Waiting” about his experience in Africa. His book “Blood of the Liberals” won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has also written two novels, “The Half Man” and “Central Square.” Packer was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. After graduating from Yale in 1982, he served in the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.