Shallow waters?

Re: "Deep Divers: Writers Who Make Sense of the Wide World" (CJR, September/October). The first book featured is The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer. In his author profile, David Glenn writes that the early chapters, "which chronicle the intellectual prehistory of the Iraq

"Almost everyone"? What a dishonest, sloppy phrase. Who was Packer's "everyone"? Surely not the vast numbers of people around the world who demonstrated against the U.S. invasion before it was launched. Surely not seasoned Middle East experts and State Department veterans like the Columbia professor Gary Sick, who held a Columbia alumni seminar in Washington, DC., spellbound as he predicted what was to come, months before it happened.

To Glenn's credit, he writes that "it is startling that the only antiwar figure who appears even briefly in The Assassins" Gate is Eli Pariser, a MoveOn organizer.... Packer's frustration with such people--his dislike of having conversations with them--apparently extends from his private life to the book itself."

Maybe if Packer had forced himself to listen to such people, he would deserve to be called a "deep diver." On the basis of Glenn's profile, he doesn't.

Barbara Ryan

Denver, Colorado