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. 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...