Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
365 pages including index
published in 2006

The Emerald City was what its inhabitants called the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2003-2004: a pleasant bubble of transplanted America, cut off from the everyday reality of Iraq, the ultimate ivory tower where the Coalition Provisional Authority that was in power in that year made its plans for the future of Iraq, unhindered by much knowledge of the world outside their bubble. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an eyewitness account of that first year of the American occupation of Iraq, as seen from inside the bubble. It's a story of how wide eyed innocents and well intentioned ideologues came to Iraq to remake the country into a model of Jeffersonian freemarket democracy, with little more to recommend them for the job than their personal loyalty to Bush and the Republican party and how they were cruelly disappointed by the reality of post-war Iraq and its missed opportunities.

In short, this is a whitewash, though perhaps not a conscious whitewash. It's true the New York Times quote on the back calls this a "A visceral --sometimes sickening-- picture of how the administration and the handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq" and that every other page or so has you slapping your face at yet another incredibly obvious stupidity, but in the end it's still a whitewash. The clue is in that word bungled. As if the Bush administration and their lackeys in Iraq started the war and subsequent occupation with the best of intentions, but lacked the competence to fulfill them, or took the wrong decisions for Iraq not to further their own ends, but because they were a bit naive about the realities of the country. The book is steeped in the assumption that, while the people in charge may have made the wrong decisions, they had every right to attempt to make those decisions. It's like reading a book on British rule in India that only tells of the problems the British had in establishing their rule and in the day to day running of their empire, without ever questioning the presence of the British there.

This isn't surprising if you consider exactly who the author, Rajiv Chandrasekaran actually is. According to his biography, he's currently the national editor of The Washington Post, while during the period his book covers he was their bureau chief in Baghdad. He's been a "public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center" as well as "the journalist in residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies". His wife is an editor on Fortune Magazine and they of course live in Washington. In short, Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an insider himself, somebody who shares the background assumptions of the people who he writes about here. These shared assumptions provide the context for Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Chandrasekaran takes at face value the reasons for the American invasion of Iraq, as well as the "democratising" mission of the US occupation afterwards. There is therefore no fundamental criticism of the War on Iraq and the Occupation, just of the mistakes made and the lost opportunities during the occupation, which is again narrowly defined, as the year the CPA was in charge. It's the decisions made by the CPA that are criticised here, not the right of the CPA to make those decisions.

Within these limitations Imperial Life in the Emerald City remains a devestating critique of the approach taken by the Bush administration to the occupation of Iraq. Chandrasekaran makes clear from the start that there had been little or no pre-war planning for the aftermath, that what little planning existed was driven more by domestic politics and ideological fanaticism, with an emphasis on not spending too much American money and resources on that job. At the same time bureaucratic infighting, especially between the department of defence and the vice president's office on the one hand and the state department on the other hand, with the first distrusting the expertise of the latter because they weren't ideologically sound hindered the execution of the grand rebuilding programme Iraq needed. What's more, because the CPA was largely run by free market/neoconservative ideologues a lot of time and effort was put into a largely futile effort to restructure Iraq on modern, western lines, without taking into account the reality of the country which suffered from rampant unemployement and large scale destruction of its infrastructure due to the war. Finally, the army's paranoia about security meant that the CPA was largely isolated from the day to day reality of Bagdhad and its citizens, let alone Iraq as a whole.

Most of the people Chandrasekaran talks to come across as inexperienced and ill-prepared for their jobs in the CPA, but genuinely willing to do their best to get Iraq back on its feet, even when blindered by their adherence to free market ideology. Many of the ideologues who came to Iraq jumping at the chance to transform it into a "Jeffersonian Democracy" are shown to have genuinely believed this was for the good of the country in the long term, even though it would worsen things in the short term. Because they were living in the Green Zone in splendid isolation, they could keep up this belief. It encouraged grandiose, resource intensive schemes while ignoring the everyday problems of the Iraqi population. To name but one example was the idea to replace the system of food rations Saddam had initiated by a system where instead of food handouts every Iraqi family would get a fixed limit credit card (!) in a country that had little or none of the modern bank infrastructure you'd need for this scheme...

As said, Chandrasekaran is remarkably sympathetic towards most of the CPA staff, even Paul Bremer. The only place where he really gets venomous is when talking about profiteers like Bernie Kerik, the ex-New York police commisioner who became the Interim Minister of Interior of Iraq and Senior Policy Advisor to Paul Bremer, despite having no qualifications for this, purely because his actions on September 11 had made him into some sort of hero. In Iraq, he was only interested in preening at press conferences and going on dubious midnight raids with a similar minded Iraqi policy buddy; Chandrasekaran seems to be genuinely incensed by this, as opposed to the much more neutral description of other CPA blunders.

In general Imperial Life in the Emerald City is a good but limited critique of the United States occupation of Iraq, which concentrates on the blunders made by the CPA, but which doesn't question the fundamental right of America to actually be in the country. It's likely that if you've been following the news from Iraq closely few of the mistakes and outrages mentioned here will be new to you, but at the same time it's good to be reminded of them again. Recommended if you keep the book's limitations in the back of your mind.

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