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IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: INSIDE BAGHDAD’S GREEN ZONE
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran


Reviewed by Gerald J. Loftus
APR 24, 2008

As we mark the fifth anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it is worth revisiting that first year of the U.S. occupation.  The Green Zone of Chandrasekaran’s title has come to symbolize the entire Iraq venture, the enclave where America tried to graft its national narrative and institutions onto a Middle Eastern society, and then was surprised at the transplant’s rejection.  In the immediate aftermath of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, it is a time of striking images and—in some corners of the neoconservative world—heady dreams of remaking the Middle East in America’s mold.  It’s the world of the Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA, under “viceroy,” “proconsul,” “presidential envoy,” or simply, as his official title said, Administrator L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer. Enter this world with Rajiv Chandrasekaran and prepare to… laugh.  You know you shouldn’t, but some of his vignettes on the heights of hubris on the Tigris are so outrageously funny that you might weep.  As you should, for the absurd tragicomedy of life in the Green Zone is rendered here as nowhere else.  Funny but never flippant, Chandrasekaran was The Washington Post Baghdad Bureau Chief before, during, and after the invasion. Though there is shooting, this is not a “war story,” and most of the fireworks are from policy conflicts within the blast-proof walls of the American bunker.  “Green Zone Scenes” provide illuminating introductions to each chapter’s theme.  There are good guys and gals who earnestly try to contribute to rebuilding war-torn Iraq, though many are completely out of their depth.  The wounds are mostly self-inflicted, and they are many: the Pentagon prohibits retired general Jay Garner, the original post-conflict czar, from seeing the multi-volume State Department “Future of Iraq” study;  free marketeers bent on privatizing Iraqi state-owned industry succeed in adding thousands to the ranks of the unemployed.  “A Deer In the Headlights,” as one chapter is entitled, sums up the willful disregard for area expertise, rejected in favor of ideological certainties. My favorite vignette is on the public diplomacy skills of the CPA’s police chief: “experts concluded that more than 6,600 foreign police advisers should be sent to Iraq immediately.  The White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.”  Kerik spent only a couple of months in Iraq before returning to the U.S. and his ill-fated run for Homeland Security Secretary.  At one point he asks an aide, “who the [expletive deleted] are these people?,” referring to a group of Iraqi judges, assembled at the Palace to meet CPA counterparts.  We are not told whether they overheard Kerik. Not all CPA staffers had such bad manners, but the mutual incomprehension was the same.  Stratcomm (Strategic Communications, or the PR shop) had true believers in the civ-mil duo of Dan Senor and Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt;  Chandrasekaran highlights one revealing press conference exchange with an Iraqi journalist: Q: General Kimmitt, the sound of American helicopters, which fly so close to the ground, is terrifying young children, especially at night.  Why do you insist on flying so…...  -->

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