Book Review - 'Interesting Times - Writings From a Turbulent Decade,' by George Packer - Review - NYTimes.com One of the perks of writing for a prestigious magazine like The New Yorker is that some high-end publisher will inevitably anthologize your articles into a fat volume. These books have always been somewhat awkward affairs - involving the creative project of writing a preface that ties pieces on disparate subjects (from, say, Outer Mongolian barbecue to the later plays of George Bernard Shaw) into one grand theme (perhaps the loss of American innocence). Still, such collections preserve a good portion of a life's work for posterity and please devoted fans. I keep an inspirational copy of Hendrik Hertzberg's "Politics" nearby. George Packer Writings From a Turbulent Decade By George Packer Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28. But since most of these volumes no longer cull material from deep in barely accessible library stacks, they have become an even stranger publishing phenomenon. Most of a writer's work can be collected on a reader's desktop after a few moments spent rooting through online archives - just a bit longer than it takes to make a purchase from Amazon but at a far more recession-friendly price. The essays in "Interesting Times" constitute much of George Packer's oeuvre from the Bush era, though not all of it. He has already repurposed some of the most memorable pieces in his magisterial narrative of the early years of the Iraq war, "The Assassins" Gate." The articles collected here (most, but not all, from The New Yorker) include his more recent reportage from Iraq, dispatches from sundry other hellholes of the world (Lagos, Abidjan, Yangon), coverage of the last presidential campaign and a smattering of literary criticism (mainly about Graham Greene and V. S. Naipaul). This volume coheres better than most in the genre. That's because Packer has a far more coherent worldview than most reporters. The first essay in this collection, "Living Up to It," originally appeared in 2003 as the introduction to a collection Packer edited called "The Fight Is for Democracy." That book was something of a manifesto for a group that came to be known as the liberal hawks. Packer makes a robust case that liberals should lead the fight against political Islam, which he sees as the latest manifestation of totalitarianism. In language that you don't hear much in the Obama era, he writes of this ideological struggle, "There is no possibility of a negotiated peace, because the ideologies are incompatible - they can't coexist." Looking back at the idealism of this essay - and others like it from the years immediately following 9/11 - Packer feels a bit uneasy. "Something in the tone and language no longer sits well," he concedes. Yet he doesn't distance himself any more than that. Nor should he. His rhetoric may have been overheated in places, but he was hardly a war-crazed neocon (though you wouldn't know that from the complaints of some of his critics). His reporting on the "morning after Saddam" contains ample warning about the difficulties of reconstituting the deeply bruised Iraqi society. And if Packer doesn't seem ready to abandon his old ideals, that's because he still fundamentally holds them, albeit in a chastened manner. His hero is George Orwell, who came home from the Spanish Civil War disgusted by the excesses of the Republican side but hardly cynical. Similarly, even after the monumental missteps of the Bush administration, Packer refuses to jettison his belief in what he calls humanitarianism. That impulse manifests itself most in his continued commitment to Iraq and Iraqis - the subject of the best pieces in "Interesting Times." Before counterinsurgency emerged as the military's palliative of choice for our quagmires, Packer profiled and championed the soldier-­intellectuals who exhumed the doctrine from the strategic catacombs of the Vietnam War. While counterinsurgency has since hardened into conventional wisdom, Packer's subjects were hardly the establishment when he wrote about them. They were rebels, fed up with the ineffectual approach of generals who kept their armies in remote bases at great distances from most Iraqis. Clearly, Packer is also drawn to counterinsurgency because of its humanitarian bent, the sense that a sound military plan must include building schools and clinics and roads, not just killing bad guys. It's this sense of obligation that is explicit in the book's most powerful article, "Betrayed," about the fate of the Iraqis who enthusiastically volunteered to assist the American invaders, joining up as translators and support personnel. They were the ones who truly greeted us with flowers and candy. We returned the favor by leaving them unprotected as thugs kidnapped and murdered them for their collaboration. I remember this essay vividly from the time it first appeared - his subjects" love for American culture, even Metallica, and their utter terror. Rereading it broke my heart all over again. Packer later used this story as the basis for a play, but the monologue in the article didn't need any theatrical embellishment. "Sometimes, I feel like we're standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die," one of these Iraqis tells him. The articles here grow less gripping with their geographic distance from Iraq. There are portraits of Ivory Coast gangstas who have embraced the culture of American hip-hop, wearing baggy pants and baseball caps with the bill turned up, and a somewhat less virtuosic portrayal of Myanmar under the grip of its junta, which suffers from Packer's own muddled sense of how American policy should treat that hermetic regime. These essays come wrapped around subtle arguments about the limits of globalization - or rather, lessons about how globalization transmits the worst of our culture and breeds resentments. Finally, the book ends with a whimper - a surprisingly inert section on the last presidential campaign, which hardly has the reportorial energy or insights of Packer's foreign reportage. "Interesting Times" seems an inapt title, ironic and detached in ways that Packer is simply not. But his is the good kind of attachment, self-aware and self-reflective. He writes, "One can only be honest about having a point of view while remaining open to aspects of reality - the human faces and voices - that might demolish it." In his best work, reality is haunting, indeed. Franklin Foer is the editor of The New Republic.