All Intensive Purposes

Echoing what I was just saying about the man, George Packer reviews My Year in Iraq, Paul Bremer's memoir about running the Coalition Provisional Authority in the Washington Post, and finds Bremer and his book strangely disengaged from what has happened in Iraq and what it means:

His new memoir, apparently drawn from late-night e-mails to his wife, Francie, back in Washington, is a day-to-day account of Bremer's 14 months in Baghdad -- in a job of impossible demands, during a period of nonstop crisis, in which he seldom had the luxury to look more than a few days ahead and never back. But even now, with retrospection and 400 pages at his disposal, Bremer seems uninterested in, and perhaps incapable of, thinking it all over. My Year in Iraq (the title feels like an afterthought) will not survive alongside the diplomatic memoirs of George F. Kennan, Dean Acheson and Richard Holbrooke, as either literature or history. Rushed, self-confident and essentially superficial, the book is of a piece with the war that produced it.

I recently read Packer's book, The Assassin's Gate, and it is excellent. If you've been thinking of picking it up, do.