The Assassins’ Gate is the main entrance to the Green Zone, the fortified enclave of Saddam’s former palaces that now houses the US military and political leadership in Baghdad. George Packer’s remarkable book is an account of how America found itself in occupation of Iraq, using the country as a laboratory for the dissemination of democracy in the Middle East. The book is also an anatomy of chaos and failure, of how a utopian experiment went disastrously wrong.

Packer’s intimate narrative is based throughout on the experiences of people caught up in violence and confusion. He describes, for example, the effects of the war on the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq, and on a young Iraqi woman who had hoped for secular liberation and found only religious oppression. Packer is also frank about his own evolving views, and paints a dark picture of Iraq’s future in the aftermath of the 2005 elections. This is a literary work of contemporary history that is adequate to its terrible subject, the most controversial foreign policy adventure since Vietnam.