- The Green Zone - Imperial Life In The Emerald City
- By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
- 320 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95
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- 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.
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- 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 Baghdadbureau 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.
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- 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.
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- 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 USAID told him that the White House wanted a 'loyalist' in the job."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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 the inconvenient 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.
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- 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.
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- If there is one thing missing from this account it is
the author himself. Reading a 300-page book is a bit like driving across
country with a stranger you've met through a message board. By the time
you reach the Mississippi you hope to know your traveling companion reasonably
well. That's not the case here.Chandrasekaran's personal views are absent
until almost the very end of the book.
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- I think I understand why. He is adhering to the professional
code of journalism: reporting facts with scrupulous neutrality and objectivity.
However, I sometimes think that the relentless political attacks on the
professionalism of reporters in Iraq have forced them to take a very narrow
view of what that neutrality and objectivity mean. Those of us who have
covered the invasion and its aftermath have an obligation not only as journalists
but as citizens. We have had a privileged view of these epoch-defining
events (and we didn't get our jobs by taking litmus tests on abortion).
We have a duty to bear passionate, accurate, personal witness - to be something
more than mere compilers of facts.
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- 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.
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- Michael Goldfarb is the author of "Ahmad's War,
Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq."
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