Regardless of how the
war ends, Iraq is not Vietnam. This is true not
just militarily and politically but also in the reporting about the two
conflicts. For many journalists who covered Vietnam and subsequently
wrote books about the war, the experience could be understood only as a
hallucinogenic nightmare, and they described it in gonzo prose to
match. The reality of Iraq is much more frightening than a bad acid
trip, but the writing about this continuing fiasco has been clear eyed
and sober, and all the more powerful for it. Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s
“Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone” is a fine
example.This
book tells the bureaucratic story of Iraq’s Year 1, the year after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein,
when the United States was the legal occupying power and responsible
for the country’s administration. The primary mechanism for that work
was the Coalition Provisional Authority, headquartered in the Green
Zone, a blast-barrier-encased compound created around Hussein’s Baghdad
palace, on the west bank of the Tigris. Chandrasekaran, The Washington
Post’s Baghdad bureau chief during this period, catalogs a lethal
combination of official arrogance and ineptitude behind those walls
that doomed Iraq to its bloody present every bit as much as
insufficient military manpower did. To begin with, the C.P.A.’s recruitment policy would have shamed Tammany Hall. Loyalty to George W. Bush and the Republican
Party was apparently the prime criterion for getting work at the C.P.A. To
determine their suitability for positions in Iraq, some prospective
employees were asked their views on Roe v. Wade. Others were asked whom
they voted for in 2000. Republican congressmen, conservative think
tanks and party activists were all solicited by the White House’s
liaison at the Pentagon, James O’Beirne, to suggest possible staffers. Before
the war began, Frederick M. Burkle Jr. was assigned to oversee Iraq’s
health care system. He had a résumé to die for: a physician with a
master’s degree in public health, and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale,
Dartmouth and Berkeley. He also had two bronze stars for military
service in the Navy, as well as field experience with the Kurds in
northern Iraq after the 1991 gulf war. A week after the liberation, he
was told he was being replaced because, Chandrasekaran writes, “a
senior official at US AID told him that the White House wanted a
‘loyalist’ in the job.” That loyalist was James K. Haveman Jr., who had been recommended by the former Michigan governor John Engler. Haveman’s résumé included running a Christian adoption agency that counseled young women against abortions.
He spent much of his
time in Iraq preparing to privatize the
state-owned drug supply firm — perhaps not the most important priority
since almost every hospital in the country had been thoroughly looted
in the days after Hussein was overthrown.On page after page,
Chandrasekaran details other projects of the C.P.A.’s bright young
Republican ideologues — like modernizing the Baghdad stock exchange, or
quickly privatizing every service that had previously been provided by
the state. Some of these ideas would have been laudable if they were
being planned for a country with functioning power and water supplies,
and that wasn’t tottering on the brink of anarchy. But how
could these young Americans have known what life was like for ordinary
Iraqis since they never left the Green Zone? Instead, they turned the
place into something like a college campus. After a hard day of
dreaming up increasingly improbable projects, the kids did what kids do
— headed for the bar and looked for a hookup. As for the Iraqis, they
were conspicuous by their absence. Presiding over this unreal
world was the American viceroy, L. Paul Bremer III,
who comes across in this book as a man who has read one C.E.O. memoir
too many, a man who knew his mind and would not have his decisions
changed by theinconvenient reality of Iraqi life just outside the
blast barriers. All of this would be funny in a Joseph Heller kind of
way if tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers
weren’t to die because of the decisions made by the C.P.A., the
Pentagon and the White House. In Chandrasekaran’s account, all
the arrogance, stubbornness and desire for career advancement
crystallized at the end of March 2004, when Bremer decided to shut down
a newspaper published by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
With typical high-handedness, he made the decision without thinking
through the possible consequences. He had no military backup plan if
Sadr decided to fight and, predictably, Sadr’s Mahdi Army did fight
back. Within a few days four American private security operatives were
ambushed and killed in Falluja, their mutilated bodies hung from a
bridge over the Euphrates. Suddenly, a year after overthrowing Hussein,
the United States was fighting Shiite insurgents on one front and Sunni
insurgents on another. This is the one and only time that the American
military appears in Chandrasekaran’s otherwise civilian story, but his
description of the skirmish between a platoon from the Army’s First
Cavalry Division and Mahdi Army fighters is absolutely brilliant. It is
eyewitness history of the first order. It would have been
worthwhile if Chandrasekaran had given us a greater sense of what he
thought about overthrowing Hussein and, more to the point, what he felt
upon returning to Washington after having seen the bloody result of its
policies. But that is a philosophical difference I have with the
Author. This is a clearly written, blessedly undidactic book. It should
be read by anyone who wants to understand how things went so badly
wrong in Iraq.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.
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