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Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
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From Publishers Weekly
As the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, Chandrasekaran has probably spent more time in U.S.-occupied Iraq than any other American journalist, and his intimate perspective permeates this history of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquartered in the Green Zone around Saddam Hussein's former palace. He presents the tenure of presidential viceroy L. Paul Bremer between May 2003 and June 2004 as an all-too-avoidable disaster, in which an occupational administration selected primarily for its loyalty to the Bush administration routinely ignored the reality of local conditions until, as one ex-staffer puts it, "everything blew up in our faces." Chandrasekaran unstintingly depicts the stubborn cluelessness of many Americans in the Green Zone—like the army general who says children terrified by nighttime helicopters should appreciate "the sound of freedom." But he sympathetically portrays others trying their best to cut through the red tape and institute genuine reforms. He also has a sharp eye for details, from casual sex in abandoned offices to stray cats adopted by staffers, which enable both advocates and critics of the occupation to understand the emotional toll of its circuslike atmosphere. Thanks to these personal touches, the account of the CPA's failures never feels heavy-handed. (Sept. 22) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From The New Yorker
This revealing account of the postwar administration of Iraq, by a former Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, focusses on life in the Green Zone, the American enclave in central Baghdad. There the Halliburton-run (and Muslim-staffed) cafeteria served pork at every meal—a cultural misstep typical of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which had sidelined old Arab hands in favor of Bush loyalists. Not only did many of them have no previous exposure to the Middle East; more than half had never before applied for a passport. While Baghdad burned, American officials revamped the Iraqi tax code and mounted an anti-smoking campaign. Chandrasekaran's portrait of blinkered idealism is evenhanded, chronicling the disillusionment of conservatives who were sent to a war zone without the resources to achieve lasting change. Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker
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Product details
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (September 19, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781400044870
ISBN-13: 978-1400044870
ASIN: 1400044871
Product Dimensions:
6 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
254 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#309,892 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This is the definitive take on the US occupation of Iraq and everything that went wrong. Chronicling the lead up to the invasion to the hand over of sovereignty in June 2004 it shows how intelligent people with the best of intentions created such a mess.The main take away is how officials were chosen for political connections and ideological purity rather than their qualifications. Time and again Middle East hands and Arabic speakers are passed over for trusted conservatives.There's a lot of good stuff in this book about the occupation was run and how it went so wrong. And a lot of lessons for people in government today.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran is with the Washington Post; he has spent time in both Afghanistan and Iraq since the American missions in both places. His experiences in Iraq as well as his interviews with those in Iraq during the time of the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority, under the control of Paul Bremer) and the precursor organization (under Jay Garner)provide important bases for this work. The picture is not pretty, and ties in with arguments advanced by other books on Iraq written of late.First, as readers already know, there was no real plan for after the war. The book makes it clear that much of the redevelopment of Iraq was ad hoc. Since no one understood how much in tatters the electrical grid was, there was no real preparation for dealing with the degraded system. And the end result was that infrastructure was worse after the war as compared with before. And the CPA was unable to do much to restore power and make the system work better.Second, many of the "leaders" selected by the CPA were chosen for their political connections. For instance, very young (twenty something) people who had built IOUs from the Administration for, for instance, working in the Bush election campaign, were selected to head units for which they had no expertise at all. Sometimes, seasoned administrators were pushed aside, occasionally because they were not gung ho enough politically.Third, the CPA was fairly clueless about what was happening on the ground in Iraq. They were slow to pick up on the insurgency, for example. It took them some time to understand the importance of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. They became landlocked in the "Green Zone," as conditions worsened outside.The book begins with a quotation from T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), who said in 1917: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them."The book indicates the number of times when Iraqis were given secondary status to Americans, whether in running organizations or on political decision-making. One important neoconservative, on reflection of his experiences in Iraq, became most disillusioned. He commented to the author: "I'm a neoconservative who's been mugged by reality (page 5)." What began as an easy military victory turned into a quagmire. As the American involvement moved from liberation to occupation, things began to disintegrate. As one Iraqi told the author (page 290): "The biggest mistake of the occupation was the occupation itself."All in all, one of the more powerful books about the American incursion into Iraq; it is also one of the best descriptions of the CPA's reign in Iraq. It triangulates strongly with other volumes.
A review of this book would have to start, first and foremost, with what this book is and is not. It is definitely not the story of the run-up to the Iraq war, the actual military invasion or the counter-insurgency. Instead it tells the tale of the those hired to engage in the civilian reconstruction of the country after the "official" end of hostilities (i.e., after President Bush `s famous aircraft carrier landing underneath the "Mission Accomplished" banner) until one year afterwards (the approximate time pro-consul Bremmer departed the scene).As many Amazon reviewers have noted in their reviews, the book does an extraordinary job at pointing out how pervasive political loyalty was in hiring. There are many stories of very well qualified individuals being passed up for positions so that political hacks from organizations like the American Enterprise or Hoover or Stanford Institutes or those with "reasonable" political views (i.e., anti-abortion) could be hired instead. Examples included medical doctors hired to administer Iraq's hospitals and medical infrastructure without any third world experience and a financial administrator to run Iraq's equivalent of the Security and Exchange Commission who was straight out of school without a single day of work experience. The hiring of these "yes" men had results that had the obvious predictable results (i.e., an inability to get the country's hospital systems and stock market exchanges up and running).Before Christ was born Confucius had the following exchange with one of his students (Analects of Confucius 13.15): "Is there one single maxim that could ruin a country?", the student asked. Confucius replied: "Mere words could not achieve this. There is this saying , however: `The only pleasure of being a prince is never having to suffer contradiction'. If you are right and no one contradicts you, that's fine; but if you are wrong and no one contradicts you - is this not almost a case of `one single maxim that could ruin a country'?" The placing of political loyalty over qualifications in hiring clearly illustrated the dangers Confucius was attempting to point out.Another consequence stemming from the placement of political loyalty over and above qualifications, though related to it and one that few other reviewers seem to have commented on, was the resulting idealist detachment from reality that resulted. The 21 year old hired to get Iraq's stock exchange up and running, for example, did not want to settle for just that simple objective but instead strived to set up the leading stock market in the Arab world. Considering the "on the ground" facts this proved impossible. Hence instead of, possibly, achieving the objective of just getting the stock exchange up and running at its pre-invasion level of efficiency and transparency the fool could not even get a stock market to open up at all. Another political loyalist, an administrator responsible for Iraq's university system, instead of striving to get the universities open by supplying textbooks and desks did his very best to push making Iraq's university system comparable to those in Western nations. Again, considering the "facts on the ground", this proved a fantasy and the university system could not even open during his reign.All of this reminds one of the English admiral Lord Hood's actions at Toulon against the French Directorate (in the early 1790s). There, he had a number of objectives open to him. One was destroying the French fleet. Another was establishing a beachhead for the anti-royalist forces to rally against The Directorate. A third was to foster a counter-revolution by supporting the royalist forces already gathered there. Any one of these may have been achievable realistically. Instead Hood tried to accomplish all three and, inevitably, failed.
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