Perhaps the most succinct and honest recantation was that offered by The New Republic, that bastion of muscular liberalism: ‘At this point, it seems almost beside the point to say The New Republic deeply regrets its support for the war. The past three years have complicated our idealism and reminded us of the limits of American power and our own wisdom.’

Michael Gawenda, editor of the The Age at the time of its controversial editorialising in favour of the Iraq war, eschews such self-flagellation in American Notebook. While Gawenda never expressly resiles from his choice to steer the The Age in the direction that he did, the decision casts such a pall over the book that it is hard to avoid the impression that it has tortured him ever since. For Gawenda, who abhors polemic and laments that he ‘lacked the certainty of religious or ideological conviction to be a shouter’, the refuge offered by equivocation was not open to him as an editor. He writes of the conviction that forced his hand: ‘about some things, doubts are a luxury, and […] in some circumstances being tortured by doubt is a form of selfindulgence.’ The embrace of certitude, however, is not comfortable for a man ‘convinced of the desirability of doubt, which I believed was the best way to avoid the awful consequences of certainty’.

Gawenda’s editorship ended in late 2003. From 2005 to earlier this year, Gawenda served – in what is clearly his dream-posting – as Washington correspondent for the The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. While much of American Notebook will be familiar to readers of the Fairfax broadsheets, this insightful book is far more than an assembling of his reportage. Commencing with an acutely observed description of George W. Bush’s hubris-laden 2005 inauguration, Gawenda interweaves tales of his experiences in the United States with reflections on his Jewish lineage, his youth spent in Fitzroy and Caulfield (steeped in both the refuse and the refinement of American culture), and his experiences as a journalist and editor. The various strands, however, are far from tangential musings. This is a focused narrative in which every experience is viewed through the prism of how it has informed Gawenda’s evolving view of the United States. The inevitable realisation he arrives at after a lifetime of searching is that the United States is neither the goldene medine his father longed for nor ‘the Big Empty’ that Norman Mailer rails against in his dotage.

To conclude that the American Dream is a chimera is clichéd. But to conclude that the corollary of this is that America’s aspirations, both for itself and for the world, lack legitimacy is to fall prey to the reflexive anti-Americanism that Gawenda sees as corroding rational debate: ‘to accept Bush’s good-versus-evil paradigm of the world and then cast him on the side of evil was ridiculous.’ The United States that Gawenda traverses is so diverse, so contradictory, inconsistent and hypocritical as to preclude any accurate generalisations. Above all else, American Notebook is a plea for nuance.

The post-9/11 world is characterised by Gawenda as requiring ‘a certain moral clarity […] which did not mean that the world could be divided into good people and evil people. Moral clarity does not mean that the world is suddenly made less complex.’ Not for Gawenda, however, the sort of cultural relativism for which he reserves some of his most trenchant criticism: ‘For me, the great tragedy was that the left, including the moderate social democratic left, in the main lacked this sort of moral clarity.’ At the same time, however, the ‘moral clarity’ espoused by Bush, ‘who didn’t do nuance’, is one that ‘left no room for anything but a black and white world’.

Grappling with the underlying motivations of prominent neo-conservatives has become almost a parlour sport for analysts of the neo-conservative movement, and Gawenda is not immune to the temptation. While Gawenda is quicker than others to conclude that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney’s shared belief in the deployment of American might is unwedded to any transformational foreign policy, his analysis of Paul Wolfowitz is more searching but perhaps less convincing. Gawenda seizes on the tale, recounted in Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way (2007), of Wolfowitz’s unsolicited pronouncement to leading Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya of his sense of shame for what he regarded as the betrayal of the Iraqi people after the first Gulf War, which culminated in American encouragement, and then abandonment, of the Shia uprising to topple Saddam’s régime. It was, says Gawenda, a defining regret for Wolfowitz: ‘Perhaps guilt and remorse rather than ideological zeal explains why Wolfowitz acquiesced in a plan that could well lead to disaster.’

Perhaps, but an analysis of Wolfowitz’s background suggests there is a middle ground here between the drive for conscience-cleansing redemption and the democracy-exporting zealotry that might more readily explain his motivations. As James Mann convincingly contends in Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (2004), Wolfowitz’s consistent invocations of the ideals of freedom and democracy have invariably been buttressed by pragmatic calculations about American interests. If not quite realpolitik, Wolfowitz’s long and well-documented case for the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf oilfields point to a tactical dimension to his Middle East ambitions that has as little to do with democracy as with any heartfelt need for personal atonement.

Gawenda’s keenness to attribute such human motives to Wolfowitz is consistent with his casting of Wolfowitz as a compassionate and ultimately tragic figure. Here was a deeply sympathetic, intelligent man, seemingly equipped to navigate the situation’s myriad complexities, whose wilful blindness to the true fate that would await a post-Saddam Iraq allowed him to make the ‘terrible and morally repulsive calculation’ to support an invasion plan he knew to be flawed. It is a damning, perhaps intemperate, conclusion – one that rests on the assumption that Wolfowitz, with whom Makiya became close, was aware that the future for Iraq envisaged by Makiya and others was imperilled, even doomed, by inadequate planning. After all, Gawenda himself confesses to having been seduced by the eventually discredited optimism: ‘Did Makiya really believe that the Baath Party régime could be removed and that the Iraq of his dreams would naturally follow? He did, and so did I.’ Misguided, yes, but morally repulsive?

There is something urbane and epistolary about Gawenda’s writing that reminded me of Alistair Cooke’s Letters from America. Cooke, the legendary journalist and broadcaster, penned weekly despatches from America for the last half of the twentieth century, each of which was transmitted to millions around the world via BBC World Service. Like Cooke, whose brief was to focus on ‘the springs of American life, whose bubbles are the headlines’, Gawenda adopts an intimate, conversational tone to delve beneath the surface and make sense of America to an outside audience. Gawenda is alive to the enormity of the task, citing (but not heeding) the advice that ‘if you are to write about the United States, best do so after a short stay, a few weeks perhaps, before the diversity and the contradictions of the place overwhelm you’.

Gawenda has spent years wrestling with these complexities, and the only certainty that the reader is left with at the end of this absorbing, honest meditation is that it has been a worthwhile endeavour.