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    Green Zone: Imperial Life in the Emerald City
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    Green Zone: Imperial Life in the Emerald City
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    Green Zone: Imperial Life in the Emerald City
    Ebook394 pages6 hours

    Green Zone: Imperial Life in the Emerald City

    By Rajiv Chandrasekaran

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From inside a surreal bubble of pure Americana known as the Green Zone, the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority attempted to rule Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Drawing on interviews and internal documents, Rajiv Chandrasekaran tells the memorable story of this ill-prepared attempt to build American democracy in a war-torn Middle Eastern country, detailing not only the risky disbanding of the Iraqi army and the ludicrous attempt to train the new police force, but absurdities such as the aide who based Baghdad's new traffic laws on those of the state of Maryland, downloaded from the net, and the twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance put in charge of revitalising Baghdad's stock exchange. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is American reportage at its best.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateApr 5, 2010
    ISBN9781408813119
    Unavailable
    Green Zone: Imperial Life in the Emerald City
    Author

    Rajiv Chandrasekaran

    Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assisting managing editor of the Washington Post, where he has worked since 1994. He previously served the Post as a bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo and Southeast Asia, and as a correspondent covering the war in Afghanistan. He recently completed a term as journalist-in-residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, and was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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    Reviews for Green Zone

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      I was pretty disturbed how many times the following mad-lib appeared when describing folks who made key decisions in Iraq's Green Zone:

      Mr./Ms X had no experience in [circle one: international politics, economic development, Middle Eastern affairs], but his/her [insert relative here:] played [circle one: tennis, golf, racquetball] with [insert White House sr staff member here:].



    • 4/5
      Chandrasekaran wrote an impressive account of life in Iraq in the first few years of the U.S. occupation. He's balanced, but he relates the reality of incompetence and arrogance among the Americans with unflinching honesty.
    • 5/5
      Heavy indictment of the American civilian administration in Iraq during the occupation 2003-04. The amount of groupthink, suppression of dissent and intentional conformity pressure present that Chandrasekaran details is almost hard to believe. Republican party connections and a right-thinking attitude were the most important qualifications for employees to have. Of course the situation involved many genuinely hard decisions that did not have one "right" answer, but the administration did not seem to have had the humility to admit this. Chandrasekaran is a bit quick to dismiss the efforts at economic reforms as misguided-these had to involve hard trade-offs one way or the other, but it is clear also they were approached haphazardly: A German working on the privatization of state-owned East-German entities in the German unification says they had 8000 people working on it; the privatization in much more chaotic Iraq was managed by three people. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      This is a book about the opportunities that we had after the war ended against Saddam in Iraq to rebuild and win the hearts and minds of the people and how we mostly squandered and wasted those opportunities.

      The plan of attack was created by the military and their plan was to let the civilians come in and do the rebuilding with a little security help from the military. However, the people that prepared ahead of time in the civilian world were not utilized (for the most part) and the people that were given the mission were often appointed for political reasons rather than based on who the best people for the job. Many people were put in charge of things in Iraq that they had no experience in leading to mission failure and created an impression that the American's didn't know what they were doing.

      The militry did a pretty good job rebuilding Europe after WWII. I suspect they would have done a much better job initially in Iraq and then could have turned over the mission to civilans. However, the military didn't want this mission.

      The truth is, had this been handled differently with a greater level of success there would have been fewer people engaged in insurgent actions and we could have been done with occupation in Iraq much quicker.
    • 3/5
      This well written book is in part sad and in part entertaining but it in no way gives the necessary background information to the Iraq fiasco. It is a sort of reality TV "crash as it happens" without much or any context at all.The kind of questions that it raises but doesn't answer are:Did the US really invade Iraq by mistake (No WMD)?Why has this unbelievable error (?) not been investigated by Congress?What happened to the US intelligence services to get it so wrong?When no WMD were found how was the story so easily switched to "Building Democracy"?Why was no money or manpower seriously devoted rebuilding Iraq?Why does the American public so nonchalantly accept torture and kidnapping by its government and the mass removal of its right to privacy?Why was Chalabi continuously promoted despite having no support among the Iraqi people?Some "perhaps" answers that Chandrasekaran hints at in the book are that the whole rebuilding project was designed to fail (i.e. it was only a publicity exercise by the US government with no real interest in rebuilding). A good illustration of this on P.131 was the Corliss, Jackson and Carney meeting (tasked with privatizing Iraqi state industries) with German specialists to draw on their experience of the privatization of East German industry. The Germans told them that they had 8000 people working on the project and one of them asked, "How many do you guys have?" Corliss sadly replied that, "You're looking at all of them".The US government delegated after war planning to Douglas Feith, the Undersecretary for Defense for Policy who also handled the so called "Office of Special Plans" which mined intelligence reports for data to make the case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and was in cahoots with Al Queda.The book doesn't say it but this is the same Douglas Feith who co-authored a 1996 paper entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies. The policy was adopted by the Israeli pro-settler right wing and Jewish activists in and around the Clinton and Bush administrations such as Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Feith himself (who all helped produce the original document). They identified as targets Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, so why should Feith want to rebuild Iraq after it had been successfully destroyed?There's more on this in Sniegoski's remarkable book, "The Transparent Cabal" which can usefully be read together with this one to start to understand what was going on.
    • 3/5
      The Green Zone, Baghdad, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen primarily for their views on issues such as abortion and capital punishment, the CPA spent the crucial first year of occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate needs of a postwar nation: flat taxes instead of electricity and deregulated health care instead of emergency medical supplies.In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate portrait of life inside this Oz-like bubble, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside. This is a quietly devastating tale of imperial folly, and the definitive history of those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.
    • 5/5
      This book completed my search to find any valid reason for the US to be in Iraq after overthrowing Saddam's regime. Chandrasekaran showed me many reasons for the US to be in Iraq. He also showed how ignorance, greed, and corruption, spoiled any chance the US had of gaining approval from the Iraqi people. With quotes from over 100 interviews, firsthand accounts, and sheer determination to observe truth; Chandrasekaran exposes the Green Zone.
    • 4/5
      A gripping recounting of the slow-moving rebuilding effort in post-war Iraq, "Imperial life" is an extremely well-researched effort by one of the only print journalists to cover the entire Iraq story from the "inside."

      Chandrasekaran lived in Iraq and had ongoing access to the "Green Zone" -- the walled compound within Bagdahd that eventually came to house the American occupying authority.

      While he lays out the events leading up to the current strife in Iraq, the most interesting information concerns the individuals charged with rebuilding Iraq -- and why they made the decisions they did.

      The list of mistakes is long, but chief among them is the lack of prior planning, the wildly incorrect assumptions made by officials, the inexperience of the often youthful managers chosen for political loyalty rather than expertise, and the isolation of the Americans from the Iraqis.

      It offers a great deal of understanding about the conditions in Iraq, and how they got that way.
    • 4/5
      A brief history of catastrophe. I'm glad that this long national nightmare is coming to a close, although what remains of America's imperial ambitions is yet to be seen.
    • 5/5
      Do you think you know every bone-headed decision that was made by the Bush administration on the civilian side of occupied Iraq? Well, guess what, I assure you that Chandrasekaran has found plenty more. Plus, the ones that you already knew were probably because of his reporting in the Washington Post in the first place. I'm not a fan of reading about military campaigns, so I have to admit that I'll never read many of the other books put on lists of great books that have come out of Persian Gulf II, like those of Thomas Ricks. That means that to me, this is the one and only book that everyone should read about the Iraq War. Just to be clear, though I'm incredibly politically biased, Chandrasekaran isn't. This is not a polemic. There are plenty of positive stories included, but seriously, how positive how you be in the middle of one of the greatest failures in the history of American imperialism?
    • 5/5
      Excellent book - another one for my IR of the Middle East class. All I can say is "wow." I never agreed with the Iraq War, but never really had any facts to back up my opinion other than personal feeling. However, after this book, it is plainly obvious that we never should have started this war. The Bush administration created a huge $3 trillion mess for the American people to pay for. It's ludicrous. All the people who were properly qualified to turn Iraq around were overlooked or dismissed so "loyalists" could be in control. Is this the beginning of the 20th century? when the huge political machines controlled America, where nothing but your party affiliation mattered. After this and "The Looming Tower" I am thoroughly disgusted with the Bush administration and disgusted with humanity in general. All nations and peoples resort to violence when they don't get their way, and rather than put the good of all first, they cater to their personal interests and egos. Sorry for the tirade. I do feel I should read another book from a different viewpoint, though, because one should always see both sides before completely making one's own mind. I'll get around to it sometime I suppose.
    • 4/5
      A damning indictment of the US military occupation, this book is both entertaining and informative. Although Chandrasekaran is highly critical of the US officials charged with running the country, he writes calmly and clearly, without resorting to the simplistic cliches one might expect.
    • 4/5
      Read this and get some first-hand understanding about the difficulties we've had in accomplishing statecraft from within. Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a Washington Post reporter who covered the CPA's attempt to restore order in Iraq. His balanced account shows some clear blunders. We dissolved the military, creating 40,000 unemployed former soldiers. We banned Baath party members, including most of the former government and technical specialists, from important jobs. We may have created more division through the quota-based approach we attempted to use in establishing representative democracy. I believe the restored hospital I heard about in e-mail forwards was the one that was restored within the Green Zone. Chandrasekaran adds interest to the politics through his description of the personalities and daily life in Sadaam's former protected area. Many of the stories are ironic - such as the former St. John's professor who arrived without having read anything about Iraq. Most of the stories about our decisions and business dealings describe actions that range between sad and reprehensible.
    • 3/5
      Imperial Life in the Emerald City tells a story of the Coalition Provisional Authority - who were apparently mostly a group of young, ideological neocons, hoping their work in Iraq would expediate their rise in the Republican Party. Few of them had the even close to the experience necessary for the job - the litmus test for hiring appears to have been commitment to a specific ideology rather than competence. On top of this - they were sent to fail. No one in power seemed to understood the magnitude of the task at hand. Communicating potential for failure was not an option - nor was getting the resoures you needed to accomplish your tasks. Nor was leaving a small compound, the heart of which was a dictator's palace. From any situation like this, a series of surreal stories will emerge - this book tells them. But it does little else. The author appears to have spoken to a few disgruntled CPA employees and discuss their experience in absence of much other context. Any "success" is minimized, any failure magnified. Of the multitude of books I have read on American failures in the "War on Terror" - this is by far the worst. If you just can't resist collecting highlights of neocon arrogance, read this book. If you are looking to understand the situation in Iraq - Fiasco is a much better choice.
    • 5/5
      Eye-opening account of deliberate incompetence.
    • 4/5
      Rajiv was a WashPo reporter in Iraq from pre-invasion to late 2004. The core of his narrative is the period under Bremer when the CPA (the US civilians tasked with re-building Iraq) were stationed in the Green Zone (ie. Emerald City because in Oz, the city was Green, except that everyone wore green-colored glasses). It is a devastating account of American corruption, incompetence, denial of reality and humanitarian crimes. We get to see the reality behind the headlines during a period when we were told everything was going well and getting better when in facts things were getting worse - not in spite of the Americans, but because of the Americans. Most people today blame the CPA, Bremer in particular, which is all this book focuses on. Another book Fiasco looks at the military as well and offers some larger lessons.After reading this I am left wondering how things could have gone better. No doubt Iraq is a tough place and no plan could have gone perfectly. The biggest mistake was the assumption that free Iraq would welcome Democracy with open arms. Creating a Democracy and capitalist economy is one of the hardest things that can be done, look at the history of the west and how long it took and how bloody it has been. Dictatorships and the like are easy to set up, that is why there are so many of them. In a collapsed stated like Iraq, creating a Democracy and capitalism in a few years through American intervention was never going to work because the Iraqi's never really wanted it. It can't be forced. Many critics were saying this from the start, and the neo-cons had no plan to implement their vision - it was an afterthought after WMD's were not found.
    • 4/5
      Excellent journalistic account of the brief, pathetic history of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The occupation was not planned or thought out well at all. Ideological correctness was valued over competence as inexperienced Bush loyalists replaced those with some experience on the ground. Twenty-something congressional staffers were put in charge of rebuilding a country the size of Iraq.Chandrasekaran also has some memorable sketches of some familiar figures. Paul Bremer is not a sympathetic figure. He comes across as hard working but also as something of a control freak. Henry Kissinger, his former boss, called him this! (Place that in the category of "it takes one to know one.") His grandiose plans for Iraq fell apart as the basic needs of the Iraqi people (safety, electricity, jobs, etc.) were not met.Chandrasekaran covered the Green Zone for The Washington Post and has an insiders knowledge of the occupation. He also writes clearly and breaks down complex issues in an accessible style. He fills a need for books on the CPA; there are few out there.
    • 4/5
      Having not followed most of Chandrasekaran's reporting for the "Washington Post," I really can't say how much of this is a cut-and-paste job of the man's previous work. However, one does get a broad survey of the period when the Civilian Provisional Authority purported to run the country, and it's a quick and snappy read to boot. The sad thing is that from procounsel Jerry Bremer on down most of the people involved probably meant well, but they could never quite connect with the reality that they had a real county on their hands, and ultimately did little to ameliorate the pressing problems of Iraqi society. It's almost enough to make one believe that simply foisting Ahmed Chalabi on Iraqis as the country's new maximum leader would have been a better solution.
    • 5/5
      Superb piece of journalism, everything backed up and supported with evidence. And yes, the occupation was even less competent, even more corrupt, overall even worse than it appeared at the time.
    • 5/5
      Movie has very little to do with the book; and I found the movie to be very disappointing, very simple-minded. The book, on the other hand, is extremely powerful, extremely sad. The pathetic, criminal ignorance and ineptitude of the Bush Administration, Rumsfeld's DOD, and the neo-conservatives running the show makes this a very hard read. Chandrasekaran was the bureau chief for the Washington Post before the war and went back immediately after the invasion. He talks to everybody. (I've been following Chandrasekaran's career since he was writing Wash. Post Metro stories about Old Town Alexandria! as he worked with a friend of mine. He went on to become a foreign correspondent.) Great, great job of reporting.
    • 4/5
      The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is depicted as full of good intentions, but severely lacking in the knowledge and expertise required to do the job in Iraq. If they had been on the Titanic they would have been sequestered in first class and at the first sign of alarm would have rushed to begin arranging the deck chairs. Then, satisfied they had done all they could, they would have followed the directions of the crew to take to the life boats. Reflecting today on their accomplishments, they would be at a loss as to how the ship could have sunk with all the deck chairs so perfectly positioned. (read more)
    • 5/5
      The US did a series of terrible things to the Iraqi people, often pretty much the worst possible choice at any given time. I don’t want to downplay the human cost, but one way to read this book about the insulated lives of Americans within the Baghdad Green Zone and the truly stupid things they thought and then did is as a management book: It sets out very clearly the disastrous consequences of ignoring reality in favor of ideology, desires, and best-case scenarios.Repeatedly, the US ignored people with actual experience in postwar management—or in some extra galling cases, removed them once they’d come in—in order to give jobs to (1) well-connected contractors or (2) young Republican operatives, often straight out of college or campaign jobs. Money gushed as from a slashed artery, but only into the coffers of American contractors or other wasteful projects, rather than being targeted to Iraqi needs and priorities. They routinely chose to imagine the best possible outcome in the best of all possible worlds—creating the most advanced stock exchange in the developing world, for example—and wasted huge amounts of money, time, and even lives when what would have helped was a stock exchange that was open. I’d known about the ill-timed de-Baathification of the army, but that kind of blunder was repeated fractally, including the decision that the accounts of state owned industries were so mixed up that it would be better to start from scratch, thus taking away the money that the marginally functional ones had on hand and giving a huge windfall to the worst-off ones. Often ideology was the extra toxin that ensured disaster: the guy brought in to run Iraqi health care (replacing a guy who had actual post-conflict medical management experience), a Republican who's managed an HMO in Michigan, instituted an anti-smoking campaign and made it his mission to make sure that Iraqis got used to paying for health care, instead of having it provided by the government, when what they needed was to get the standard drugs distributed to hospitals and clinics. (Of course that supposedly libertarian ideology went along with huge handouts to Republican donors who got no-bid, cost-plus contracts and used the money to buy themselves Hummers and import labor rather than hiring any Iraqis despite the massive and destabilizing unemployment making conditions worse.)Imperialism comes off as a perniciously awful form of mismanagement: when you care only about your own priorities, and not those of the people you’re supposedly there to help, anything you do right will be unlikely and accidental. The book implicitly argues for doing good enough when a crisis happens, for figuring out what people need right now when disaster strikes and then building larger structures over the long term. (Chandrasekaran doesn’t address the decision to go to war in the first place, because his focus is on what happened once the Americans arrived to "govern," but he does suggest that the lack of planning and understanding was consistent over time.)
    • 5/5
      Disappointingly often, I find that I disagree completely with the exultant praises strewn liberally across the covers of books. ‘Superb!’ and ‘Amazing!’ often turns out to mean dull and ponderous, especially where non-fiction is concerned. Surprisingly, then, I feel compelled to state that I agree with every last one of the quotations printed on the cover of Chandrasekaran’s exploration of the management of Iraq post-invasion. It is indeed ‘black comedy’ (John le Carre) and ‘a tragic tale of naivety, hubris, waste and wilful ignorance’ (Richard Wyre, Guardian). The almost unbelievable tales of how an American led, continually shifting coalition attempted to create a Western democracy inside a war-torn Middle Eastern country create a consistently engaging – and frustrating – read.The quotation from T. E. Lawrence placed at the front of this book sums up the writer’s views on the Iraq reconstruction project perfectly, which is why I’m going to reproduce it in full here:‘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. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.’This, according to Chandrasekaran’s work, is the error the Americans leading the reconstruction effort made. Faced with a country that lacked sufficient sources of clean water, a people desperate to access basic healthcare facilities and medications, the Americans tackled what they felt were the medical necessities: they began an anti-smoking campaign. Faced with the outmoded Iraq stock exchange, the minister in charge began drawing up complicated plans to computerise everything and bring the exchange up to ‘international standards of transparency and efficiency’ – in less than four months. All the Iraqs wanted was a building, some cell phones and a blackboard. Blinded by the idea that democracy and capitalism are things you can create by splashing some cash around, the Coalition Provisional Authority continued to flounder as the Iraq people began to lose patience with their supposed rescuers.Based on interviews and documentation completed during and since his months spent in Iraq, Chandrasekaran traces the activities of the CPA in sixteen well written chapters, which are interspersed with scenes from ‘the Green zone’, the secure area those governing Iraq lived and worked in throughout the occupation. The book is neatly split into two halves: ‘building the bubble’, which tends to feature the optimistic attitudes of the various ministers, and ‘shattered dreams’, which typically focuses on the CPA’s increasing recognition of the volatility of Iraq.My thoughtsThe book is well laid out for reading and information assimilation purposes. There are two maps placed at the beginning, one of the Green Zone and one of Baghdad. These did come in useful later in the book, for example, when I wanted to quickly check where an attack on the zone was coming from. I find maps in non-fiction books worrying as it normally suggests they will be necessary to understanding the story and I just don’t want to have to work that hard mentally (ooh, where is this character going now?). In non-fiction, however, they can be vital, and while that is not quite the case here, they were helpful to get a sense of place and size.The scenes chosen from the Green Zone ‘show’ a lot of the things that Chandrasekaran tells the reader at other points, so they work well to reinforce the key messages the writer wishes to express. For instance, the first scene demonstrates the lack of direction and organisation behind the rebuilding as soldiers wait peaceably to be told what to do with some zoo animals by the incoming administration staff. The brief episode (barely two pages long) creates an uneasy atmosphere due to the preceding two chapters, in which the writer has already outlined the lack of established plans. We never hear about the zoo animals again, which is possibly simply because there is too much else worth showing and telling, but also neatly suggests the lack of attention shown to Iraq lifestyles.Chandrasekaran usefully introduces each major player in this history with a brief biography containing all the necessary details – and sometimes, perhaps, slightly more than necessary. The people he describes are generally terribly well meaning, but they all become consumed by impossible projects. They are led by their sense of what would suit America, rather than any real understanding of life in Iraq. Alternatively, if they have developed thoughtful, well reasoned, implementable suggestions, they are immediately sent home to America and a thoroughly harebrained scheme is pursued instead.The truly chilling aspect of this book is the sense of what might have been, could have been, achieved, if only the sole criteria for leading the reconstruction efforts wasn’t the political convictions of those recruited. Chandrasekaran demonstrates convincingly through his use of interviews and discussions that political connections were more important than qualifications or even experience. At times, I became quite frustrated as the journalist clearly outlined what the problems were, and then how the Americans tackled a completely different set of issues.Of course, it is difficult to understand a country if you never really experience it. Chandrasekaran shows how the decision to move into a republican palace and create a ‘bubble’ of American life on Iraq soil leads to a sense of dissociation from the place. Gradually, as tensions build, it becomes impossible to leave this sanctuary, which heightens the sense that they have become oppressors to the very people they are there to help. In this sense, it is a sad book, although Chandrasekaran never adopts an overtly pitying approach. In fact, one of his strengths as a writer is that he conveys his ideas clearly without needing to manipulate the reader in any obvious way.Of course, ultimately this is a work of journalism and different writers may have slightly different viewpoints, and everyone has their own agenda to follow, but the details that Chandrasekaran chooses usually speak for themselves. The titles of his chapters are quite forceful in emphasising his opinions, heading up the chunks of text with phrases like ‘a fool’s errand’ and ‘crazy, if not suicidal’, but I did not otherwise feel overtly manipulated.The index is comprehensive and all notes are clearly referenced, so this could be a useful introductory work for someone exploring this period in recent modern history.ConclusionI enjoyed reading this well researched and thoughtful book, even though I found the decision making it recorded nearly unbelievable at times. I do not claim to know anything about running a country, but I’m fairly sure that buying desks and books for classrooms is usually of more use to students than organising departmental affiliations with American universities. Equally, I am no economist, but I would anticipate that having the stock market running again would be more of a priority for those waiting to take back their jobs than an immediate and prolonged revamping of all systems. Of course, I could be wrong. It seems that many good-hearted people were.Highly recommended.