Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone

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 low and scaring the Iraqi people?
A: What we would tell the children of Iraq is that the noise they hear is the sound of freedom. [Followed by 15 lines of similar sanctimonious sentiment.]

If Bremer was the lord of the Green Zone, Senor was the ruler of the “Green Room,” as the Stratcomm home in the Republican Palace was known.  Senor, says Chandrasekaran, had a “you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us attitude toward journalists.”  Chandrasekaran tells of seeing only Fox News switched on in Senor’s office, and notes that Senor joined Fox post-CPA as a paid commentator on Iraq.

Public diplomacy professionals will be further interested in the in-depth treatment given to broadcast professional Don North and his efforts to set up the Iraq Media Network (IMN).  This seat-of-the-pants, under-funded, misspent resources tale is emblematic of the entire venture.  Instead of a beacon of press freedom, said North, “to some in the CPA, IMN was a propaganda tool: ‘we’re paying for it, so we can decide what airs.’”

Chandrasekaran tells of media budgets blown to airlift in flashy armored Humvees, when North was in dire need of basics like batteries for TV cameras;  of a staged “interview” of Bremer by Senor, which the Iraqi IMN staff deemed “agitprop” and refused to air;  and of a CPA-imposed daily propaganda show, preempting the IMN news.

IMN, North concluded, “had become an irrelevant mouthpiece for CPA propaganda, managed news, and mediocre programs.”  In Washington, President Bush talked about “engaging in the battle of ideas in the Arab world.”  But in Baghdad, North said, “We have already lost the first round.”

As black-comedic as “Emerald City” often is, the overall theme is of lost opportunities.  Decisions—often based solely on received ideological wisdom with no foundation in Middle Eastern realities—are made, and the consequences are tragic.  “A wasted year,” is the verdict of several American and Iraqi insiders.

Many excellent books have been written—some admittedly weightier—on the ambiguous venture called “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”  The strength of “Emerald City” is in its anecdotes, for they provide a human backdrop for well-known events like the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the descent into anarchic looting.  There are limits to the anecdotal approach, however.  In the chapter entitled “The Plan Unravels,” I wish that Chandrasekaran had tried a bit less to explicate the meanders of Bremer’s various constitutional, electoral, and institutional attempts to impose his imprint on Iraqi politics.  “Emerald City” is best read as a nonfiction novel, and Chandrasekaran makes effective use of a string of interviews with lesser-known CPA staffers, tracing their efforts, whether heroic or misguided.

“Emerald City” is above all an antidote to those who still insist on America’s “transformational” role in imposing or inducing culture-changing attitudes in foreign lands.  Chandrasekaran shows the limits of “Strategic Communication,” where the message, no matter how expertly packaged and delivered, is undermined by the realities evident to all.  Chandrasekaran, who quotes T.E. Lawrence, would have preferred that the CPA had read the legendary Arabist’s admonition:  “Do not try to do too much with your own hands.  Better the Arabs do it tolerably well than that you do it perfectly…”  In the subsequent five years, the Emerald City’s CPA morphed into the largest American Embassy in the world, the CPA nation builders left their grandiose plans for Iraq behind and jumped on the plane, and Paul Bremer collected his Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Chandrasekaran’s highly credible book shows that for the “diplomacy of the deed” to be effective, humility à la Lawrence is in order.

About the reviewer

Gerald Loftus is a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer living in Brussels.  He left the U.S. State Department in 2002, after 24 years in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, last serving as Chargé d’Affaires of the American Embassy in Luxembourg.  Most recently a consultant to the Defense Department’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies and the U.S. Joint Forces Command, he provides advice on the nexus between diplomacy and defense.  His website, Avuncular American, comments on world events as seen by an expatriate in Europe.