Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone 
An unprecedented account of life in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming pools that was the headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq.
The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran takes us with him into the Zone: into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America—a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, a movie theater that screened shoot-’em-up films, an all-you-could-eat buffet piled high with pork, a shopping mall that sold pornographic movies, a parking lot filled with shiny new SUVs, and a snappy dry-cleaning service—much of it run by Halliburton. Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and internal documents, Chandrasekaran tells the story of the people and ideas that inhabited the Green Zone during the occupation, from the imperial viceroy L. Paul Bremer III to the fleet of twentysomethings hired to implement the idea that Americans could build a Jeffersonian democracy in an embattled Middle Eastern country.
In the vacuum of postwar planning, Bremer ignores what Iraqis tell him they want or need and instead pursues irrelevant neoconservative solutions—a flat tax, a sell-off of Iraqi government assets, and an end to food rationing. His underlings spend their days drawing up pie-in-the-sky policies, among them a new traffic code and a law protecting microchip designs, instead of rebuilding looted buildings and restoring electricity production. His almost comic initiatives anger the locals and help fuel the insurgency.
Chandrasekaran details Bernard Kerik’s ludicrous attempt to train the Iraqi police and brings to light lesser known but typical travesties: the case of the twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad’s stock exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department employee forced to bribe Americans to enlist their help in preventing Iraqi weapons scientists from defecting to Iran; Americans willing to serve in Iraq screened by White House officials for their views on Roe v. Wade; people with prior expertise in the Middle East excluded in favor of lesser-qualified Republican Party loyalists. Finally, he describes Bremer’s ignominious departure in 2004, fleeing secretly in a helicopter two days ahead of schedule.
This is a startling portrait of an Oz-like place where a vital aspect of our government’s folly in Iraq played out. It is a book certain to be talked about for years to come.
Reviews
Maybe your name is James Haveman, a 60 year old social worker. I don't know if we have a job for you. Wait, you are a true party loyalist? How about taking over the Iraqi health care system? Currently we have a gentleman running it named Frederick Burkle, Jr. He's a physician with an MA in public health, postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and UC Berkeley. He specializes in disaster-response issues, a subject he taught at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The problem with him is we aren't sure he is a Republican loyalist. So Jim why don't you go over and take his place?
I am definitely not making this up. If this were a novel by, say, Carl Hiaasen, it would be the funniest book of the year. Tragically, this is real life. I finished this book right after reading "Fiasco", and don't know if I can take many more recountings of the disaster that is Iraq.
The folks that were sent to Iraq to build a new nation made all the wrong decisions at just the right time. They were literally trying to turn Iraq into a little USA. The new traffic codes and the new regulations for the stock exchange? The Iraqis read them through, and carefully filed them in the circular file. Another big idea was to sell of the assets of state run companies and attract private investors. Selling an occupied countrys' assets is a clear violation of International Law. And there were no investors in the whole world who were interested in these companies. The CPA eliminated all import tariffs, so Iraqis bought 500,000 cars in the first year of occupation. Of course this meant mile long lines at gas stations, and when you finally got your gas you entered total gridlock on streets that were often full of military roadblocks.
This is another fascinating book on the disaster of Iraq. It'll make you angry and cry out in frustration, but all of us need to know what is going on over there.
Chandrasekaran's narrative painstakingly details the many errors that have riddled the U.S. effort to reconstruct Iraq: flawed personnel selection that emphasized White House ties at the expense of technical expertise; a grandiose and unattainable mission (the CPA is charged with turning Iraq into a Western-style democracy when the more urgent needs are restoring civil rule and the electrical grid); troop levels inadequate to keep order; and a tendency to impose American concerns and solutions in an Iraqi context where they are hugely inappropriate or irrelevant.
Examples of this last difficulty are numerous. To wit: an American public health official who is preoccupied with streamlining Iraq's drug formulary during a period when hospitals lack power and basic supplies; a young U.S. program manager intent on creating the Islamic world's first computerized securities trading system when the Iraqis want only to return to the previous non-automated but functional model; American appropriations for teaching tropical agriculture classes in a non-tropical Iraqi city whose agricultural college has been bombed out of existence.
Chandrasekaran's narrative is all the more powerful because it is an even-handed depiction, rather than an anti-White House jeremiad. CPA head Jerry Bremer makes some fateful errors of judgment (most notably de-Ba'athification on too stringent a scale, the dismantling of the Iraqi army, and the failure to cultivate influential Shiite cleric al-Sistani, a failure that jettisons the U.S.'s first efforts to establish an Iraqi government), but emerges as an intelligent, tireless and charismatic leader. Other CPA staffers are revealed as dedicated-- even if occasionally under-qualified-- workers who do their best under difficult conditions and the constraints of too-short periods in which to accomplish their assignments.
Sadly, CPA workers, members of the U.S. armed forces and the American public were told that Iraq could be transformed into a Western democracy with comparative ease in a limited time frame. Chandrasekaran shows that this vision was, at best, naive. Iraq, weakened by years of dictatorship and economic hardship, lacks the economic and civic underpinnings of a successful Western democracy, and the religious and ethnic divisions that cleave the country have been exacerbated by war and economic collapse. Against this grim reality, the CPA's efforts take on a Potemkin Village-like quality.
Chandrasekaran suggests that American reconstruction efforts in Iraq would have been best directed to restoring the basics: civil order, electrical power, the functioning of state-owned enterprises that provided many Iraqis with employment, hospitals and the education system. This reader believes that he is correct, as a functioning society provides the underpinning for democracy.
Sadly, Colin Powell ("You break it, you own it") appears to have called America's results in Iraq correctly. Imperial Life in the Emerald City provides a well-drawn portrait of just how right Powell was.
The book relates the now familiar twin colossal mistakes that Bremer made almost immediately (literally Orders 1 and 2) De-Ba'athification and disbanding the Iraqi army. The first order barred some 50,000 Ba'ath party members from serving in the new Iraqi government - unfortunately these were the people who knew how to run things - the technicians and bureaucrats along with the political hacks. Disbanding the army added another 250,000 men to the rolls of the unemployed.
Chandrasekaran adds some new details. The CPA was populated by many, often young and inexperienced Republican operatives. This phenomenon occurred as a result of a vetting process that emphasized loyalty to the Bush administration over expertise. Most of these people were well-intentioned, but clueless. Enter 24-year-old Jay Hallen with no background in financial markets. His job: re-establish the Baghdad stock exchange. His grand vision included setting up a computerized market with the full panoply of market regulations - in Baghdad a place where the power ran for 9 or 10 hours a day!
Other efforts were considerably more sophisticated, but even more misguided. The CPA's mission was driven by neocon ideology. The CPA recruited and attracted neoconservatives determined to impose their free market ideology on Iraq. One could argue that Iraq would ultimately be better off with open markets, but at the time the greatest need was to simply get things working again, not establish a flat tax (yes, that was one of the initiatives). More to the point, the extent of market freedom was the kind of long-range question that only the Iraqis could decide.
Bernard Kerik, the 9/11 NYC police commissioner, slips through Baghdad - in his mind, he really couldn't afford to be there because he was missing out on lucrative speaking engagements back home where he was busily cashing in on his 9/11 experience. His presence was less than useful, but he was recruited by the Bush administration and urged on by Rudy Giuliani. He returned home and soon was convicted of official corruption.
With its focus on the Green Zone, for much of the book Emerald City mentions military action only tangentially. This gap recreates the bubble world occupied by the CPA staff, but this reader would have preferred a little more context. Ranks with George Packer's `Assassin's Gate' Thomas Ricks' `Fiasco', and Anthony Shadid's `Night Draws Near'.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Iraq war and how things went so spectacularly wrong.