Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone: Amazon.co.uk: Rajiv Chandrasekaran: 9780747591689: Books

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'A vividly detailed portrait of the Green Zone and the Coalition Provisional Authority (which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004) that becomes a metaphor for the administration's larger failings in Iraq... reads like something out of "Catch-22"' New York Times 'A riveting tale of American misadventure...a mission doomed to failure before it had even been launched' Samantha Power, author of 'A Problem from Hell' 'Full of jaw-dropping tales of the myriad large and small ways in which Bremer and his team poured fuel into the lethal cauldron that is today's Iraq' Washington Post 'An indispensable saga of how the American liberation of Iraq turned to chaos, calamity, and civil war' Rick Atkinson, author of 'An Army at Dawn'

Simon Jenkins, Sunday Times

`Chandrasekaran...watched the policy bottom-up from within and
beyond the Green Zone. The result is jaw-dropping.'

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26 Reviews

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4.5 out of 5 stars (26 customer reviews)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Incompetence, 28 Mar 2008

By

L. Thompson (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone (Paperback)

There are many impressive stories in this account of how the American invasion and occupation of Iraq went so disastrously wrong in such a short period of time. The most striking aspects are from inside the encased compound which housed the staff of the US administration:
Saddam Hussein's Baghdad palace seemed to take on the aspect of a college campus, with staff drinking beer, eating junk food and `pork', lazing by the pool, reading The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Iraq to further their knowledge, protected from the ever present and increasing violence and lawlessness around them, in a Baghdad without currency, media or power.
The author systematically reports on how the republican neo-cans picked for their loyalty to W. Bush over any experience
or knowledge of the area and language failed on every level to re-establish any kind of order within the country they had just occupied. I found this account to be a brilliant piece of old-fashioned reportage that at times read like a surreal farce. It was a privilege to have read it so soon after the events described.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Devastating Exposition of the Stupid White Men, 18 Dec 2007

By

J A C Corbett (Blackheath, London, UK) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Paperback)

As someone who grew adoring Joseph Heller's great World War Two satire, Catch-22, I never thought the day would come when I read a real life account of how the misguided and naive led an occupation effort. That day finally came last week when my postman brought me Rajiv Chanrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City.
This is an impeccably detailed and revelatory account of the US occupation of Iraq and how the seeds of disaster were sown.

Rajiv Chanrasekaran was the Washington Post's man on the ground in Baghdad in the days leading up to and immediately after the US-led invasion, so has an insight of how pallid life was under Saddam Hussein and how timorous the Iraqi people had become. He is also a rare thing among American journalists working in the daily press out there: a man who asks searching questions of his country and his countrymen's motivations.

Imperial Life is strongest when telling the story of the CPA staffers living in the 'Green Zone', a bubble, supplied with trash food and trash information about the country they occupy. Staffers inherently believe they are doing the right thing, that they have a sense of mission to democratize Iraq and build it according to their political ideals. Of course, when set against the backdrop of a humanitarian disaster, an insurgency, and without the blank cheques needed to bring such changes they never stand a chance of succeeding.

What is perhaps most depressing, beyond the human cost of occupation, is that the corruption and stupidity among most of the American staffers was not as prevalent as one would first think. For sure there is a naivety, but the idiocy lay mostly in Washington, where Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfovitz jettisoned the appointment of competent and well qualified staff in favour of political appointees. Many of these were well meaning, but young, inexperienced and wholly unsuitable Republican interns, workers and other party supporters that want to `make a difference'. Thus you have a 24 year old who had never worked in finance put in charge of rebuilding the Baghdad stock exchange on account of his political credentials and numerous others besides. Oddly, Paul `Jerry' Bremner does not come off too badly: he is portrayed as driven, stubborn, battling against the insurmountable odds on the ground and in Washington, but most often motivated by what he deems to be right (even though it often isn't; most notably in the case of his dissolution of the Iraqi army, which led directly to the insurgency).

This book loses track a bit in the second part, when there is more discourse on politics and the handover to the Iraqis. However, more lucid than Michael Moore, more polemical than the majority mainstream media, Imperial Life in the Emerald City cuts to the heart of where it all went so horribly wrong, and is essential reading not just for those interested in the Middle East but anyone who might consider voting Republican in 2008.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The biggest mistake of the occupation, was the occupation itself.", 17 Dec 2010

By

Mr. Tristan Martin (Hertfordshire, UK) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone (Hardcover)

I'm assuming we already know that the war itself was viciously premeditated and illegal. This book, through a series of lively vignettes, deftly characterises the fool's errand that the was the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority's attempt at what they called "nation building."

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's perceptive book documents how the Bush administration rejected international experts (in healthcare, education and so forth) in favour of Republican party apparatchiks who would be more interested in selling off state companies, privatising as much as possible, lowering business taxes and reducing tariffs on imports. These steps were considered more important by the Bush-friendly bureaucrats than trivial things like getting medical supplies in to hospitals.

Neoconservative ideologues thought the best way to kick start Iraq was to espouse the doctrine of free-market capitalism, whilst simultaneously hiring companies like Haliburton on the back of no-bid cost-plus contracts at the U.S. taxpayer's expense. Corporate-welfare socialism benefits and enriches certain sectors of the U.S. economy but for a country that is struggling to come to terms with a brutal, one-sided war, it is inappropriate. What is needed is to fire people from jobs, in a country where the unemployment rate for males is already 40 per cent and then explain to them that those are the benefits of living in a globalised, U.S. style capitalist market. The United States government can do that because they love human rights (as long as you're not gay or anything).

Whilst my "review" of this book is heavy handed and errs quite badly on the foaming-at-the-mouth, ranting side of things, Rajiv's writing itself, is superb, displaying a light touch, letting people, both U.S. and Iraqi, speak for themselves. Many books have described the events leading up to the war against Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City is one of the best examples of what happens after a war.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Well-researched and well-written account
I don't know that I can say much that hasn't been said. I will be succinct:

The book is really engaging; it isn't easy to put down. Read more

Published 9 months ago by M. Hamann