'We're an empire'

The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
By George Packer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 467 pp., $26

Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground
By Robert D. Kaplan
Random House, 421 pp., $27.95

Historian J. R. Seeley asserted in the 1880s that Britain's empire had been acquired in ''a fit of absence of mind." No one took him quite at his word, but his basic point -- that Britain's power had spread by ad hoc accretion rather than according to a grand design -- was true enough. Something similar might be said about the American empire, although George Packer wouldn't be the one to say it. Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of ''Blood of the Liberals," commences his account of the war in Iraq with a detailed rendering of the policies that produced the war, and there was nothing absentminded about them.

Packer's book consists, in New Yorker fashion, of a series of biographical sketches; his first profiles Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile who pseudonymously wrote ''Republic of Fear," an early indictment of Saddam Hussein's regime. Makiya's work provided ammunition for the neoconservatives who were seeking a role for the United States (and for themselves) after the Cold War. Robert Kagan was one of this group, William Kristol another, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle two more. The glue of the group was a belief that the United States must exploit its enhanced, post-Soviet hegemony to refashion the politics of the planet in a democratic mold. Under the banner of the Project for a New American Century, they published an open letter to President Clinton in 1998 calling for regime change in Iraq.

Action on their call awaited the national trauma of Sept. 11, 2001. The dust from the twin towers hadn't cleared before President George W. Bush, at the urging of the neocons in his administration, was seeking a connection to Saddam. ''See if Saddam did this," Bush ordered. ''See if he's linked in any way."

For this quote and much of his tale of the intellectual genesis of the Iraq War, Packer relies on the work of others. He summarizes well but adds little to what is already known. By contrast, his own reportage of the effects of the war on the individuals involved is much fresher and more compelling. He ranges broadly; his subjects include Andrew Erdmann, a 36-year-old Harvard PhD assigned the task of reconstructing Iraq's system of higher education; Mohamed Abbas, a 20-something Arab whose family had been relocated to the Kurdish north of Iraq and who has to deal with the post-Saddam anti-Arab backlash; Aseel, a 28-year-old computer programmer who covers her hair to keep from being murdered by Islamist fundamentalists she can hardly distinguish from Saddam's goons (''They speak in name of God," she tells Packer; ''before, they spoke in name of Saddam"); and Chris Frosheiser, an Iowan whose son Kurt was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

The missing players in Packer's tale, as in nearly all accounts of the Iraq War, are the insurgents. There is a reason for this: American journalists and other outsiders venture beyond Baghdad's Green Zone at their peril. ''No foreigner really knows what is going on in Iraq," a former British official quoted by Packer asserts. Packer does what he can with thin evidence, but he never gets close to the people who have determined to drive the Americans from Iraq, whatever the cost. And so the questions at the heart of the conflict -- who are the insurgents and just what do they want? -- remain unanswered at the end of this otherwise important book. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," an unnamed (by journalist Ron Suskind, whom Packer quotes) White House aide declares, explaining the administration's approach to the world. Until we hear more from the Iraqi insurgents, we'll never know just what this reality entails.

Robert Kaplan approaches the question of American empire from a different direction. Kaplan, an indefatigable foreign correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of ''Balkan Ghosts," crisscrosses the planet to portray the Americans who man the trenches of empire. Caesar divided Gaul into three parts; the Pentagon requires five to cover the globe. Kaplan parachutes -- figuratively, though he seems to travel by nearly every other mode -- into various zones, landing in Yemen with a retired lieutenant colonel of US Army Special Forces, currently a security officer for the United Nations; in Colombia, with active-duty Green Berets fighting narco-terrorists; in Mongolia, with an Air Force dental mission tasked to win the hearts, minds, and teeth of the locals; in the Philippines, with Army Special Forces refighting the battles American troops fought in the same vicinity a century ago; in Afghanistan, on the trail of al Qaeda; in the Horn of Africa, with Marines trying to keep that desperately poor region from becoming a breeding ground for more terrorists; and in Iraq, on Humvee patrol far beyond the Green Zone.

A reader of Kaplan could be forgiven for adopting a Seeley-ist interpretation of the American empire. Kaplan spends little time worrying about the policies that placed all those Americans in such unlikely locales, beyond declaring most of the modern world the new American frontier. '' 'Welcome to Injun Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq," he says, adding that the war on terrorism is ''really about taming the frontier." The precise location of the frontier, and the importance assigned to each segment, seems almost the result of accident.

Nor does Kaplan bother much with objectivity. ''I was beginning to love these guys," he writes, many pages after that fact has become obvious to the reader. Kaplan's attitude isn't inappropriate: The foot soldiers of the American empire are certainly admirable, if perhaps not uniformly lovable.

But the reader can't help asking whether the policies they pursue, not to mention the leaders who formulate those policies, are as worthy as the troops themselves. One can't tell from Kaplan's account. Packer provides ample cause for doubt.

H. W. Brands teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of ''What America Owes the World" and, most recently, ''Andrew Jackson." See ''Bookings," below, for information on a local appearance by George Packer.