Hide this

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside…
Loading...

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006)

by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,108266,751 (4.08)53
  1. 10
    The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer (rakerman)
    rakerman: Assassin's Gate gives a different but overlapping perspective on many of the issues covered in Imperial Life in the Emerald City; they are good companion books.
  2. 10
    Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy by Norman Lewis (wandering_star)
    wandering_star: Plus ça change... life as a foreign occupier, however friendly, seems to have faced similar challenges in very different environments.
  3. 00
    Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo Dallaire (wandering_star)
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

Showing 1-5 of 26 (next | show all)
A gripping recounting of the slow-moving rebuilding effort in post-war Iraq, "Imperial life" is an extremely well-researched effort by one of the only print journalists to cover the entire Iraq story from the "inside."

Chandrasekaran lived in Iraq and had ongoing access to the "Green Zone" -- the walled compound within Bagdahd that eventually came to house the American occupying authority.

While he lays out the events leading up to the current strife in Iraq, the most interesting information concerns the individuals charged with rebuilding Iraq -- and why they made the decisions they did.

The list of mistakes is long, but chief among them is the lack of prior planning, the wildly incorrect assumptions made by officials, the inexperience of the often youthful managers chosen for political loyalty rather than expertise, and the isolation of the Americans from the Iraqis.

It offers a great deal of understanding about the conditions in Iraq, and how they got that way. ( )
  TCWriter | Mar 31, 2013 |
A brief history of catastrophe. I'm glad that this long national nightmare is coming to a close, although what remains of America's imperial ambitions is yet to be seen. ( )
  HadriantheBlind | Mar 30, 2013 |
This is an extremely well written and researched book about the absolute disaster George W. Bush created when he invaded Iraq. The lack of planning, chronyism in appointing people to handle problems (most of whom had no background in the issue they were sent to fix and were never, ever given enough money to do the job), insistence on trying to turn Iraq into another democratic country, and the utter inability of President Bush, et al. to see the catastrophe created by the White House was eye-opening, depressing, and terrifying. The events in this book often made me so angry that I had to put it down for a day or two and it made me want to cry. Recommended to anyone who wants to know why Iraq hates America. ( )
  whymaggiemay | Feb 9, 2012 |
The US did a series of terrible things to the Iraqi people, often pretty much the worst possible choice at any given time. I don’t want to downplay the human cost, but one way to read this book about the insulated lives of Americans within the Baghdad Green Zone and the truly stupid things they thought and then did is as a management book: It sets out very clearly the disastrous consequences of ignoring reality in favor of ideology, desires, and best-case scenarios.

Repeatedly, the US ignored people with actual experience in postwar management—or in some extra galling cases, removed them once they’d come in—in order to give jobs to (1) well-connected contractors or (2) young Republican operatives, often straight out of college or campaign jobs. Money gushed as from a slashed artery, but only into the coffers of American contractors or other wasteful projects, rather than being targeted to Iraqi needs and priorities. They routinely chose to imagine the best possible outcome in the best of all possible worlds—creating the most advanced stock exchange in the developing world, for example—and wasted huge amounts of money, time, and even lives when what would have helped was a stock exchange that was open. I’d known about the ill-timed de-Baathification of the army, but that kind of blunder was repeated fractally, including the decision that the accounts of state owned industries were so mixed up that it would be better to start from scratch, thus taking away the money that the marginally functional ones had on hand and giving a huge windfall to the worst-off ones. Often ideology was the extra toxin that ensured disaster: the guy brought in to run Iraqi health care (replacing a guy who had actual post-conflict medical management experience), a Republican who's managed an HMO in Michigan, instituted an anti-smoking campaign and made it his mission to make sure that Iraqis got used to paying for health care, instead of having it provided by the government, when what they needed was to get the standard drugs distributed to hospitals and clinics. (Of course that supposedly libertarian ideology went along with huge handouts to Republican donors who got no-bid, cost-plus contracts and used the money to buy themselves Hummers and import labor rather than hiring any Iraqis despite the massive and destabilizing unemployment making conditions worse.)

Imperialism comes off as a perniciously awful form of mismanagement: when you care only about your own priorities, and not those of the people you’re supposedly there to help, anything you do right will be unlikely and accidental. The book implicitly argues for doing good enough when a crisis happens, for figuring out what people need right now when disaster strikes and then building larger structures over the long term. (Chandrasekaran doesn’t address the decision to go to war in the first place, because his focus is on what happened once the Americans arrived to "govern," but he does suggest that the lack of planning and understanding was consistent over time.) ( )
  rivkat | Jun 13, 2011 |
Do you think you know every bone-headed decision that was made by the Bush administration on the civilian side of occupied Iraq? Well, guess what, I assure you that Chandrasekaran has found plenty more. Plus, the ones that you already knew were probably because of his reporting in the Washington Post in the first place. I'm not a fan of reading about military campaigns, so I have to admit that I'll never read many of the other books put on lists of great books that have come out of Persian Gulf II, like those of Thomas Ricks. That means that to me, this is the one and only book that everyone should read about the Iraq War. Just to be clear, though I'm incredibly politically biased, Chandrasekaran isn't. This is not a polemic. There are plenty of positive stories included, but seriously, how positive how you be in the middle of one of the greatest failures in the history of American imperialism? ( )
  JasonSmith | Nov 19, 2009 |
Showing 1-5 of 26 (next | show all)
no reviews | add a review
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Series (with order)
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Information from the German Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one.
Related movies
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Information from the German Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one.
Do not try to do too much your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, nad you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is. (T. E. Lawrence, August 20, 1917)
Dedication
First words
Quotations
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Publisher series
Book description
Haiku summary

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0307278832, Paperback)

The Green Zone, Baghdad, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen primarily for their views on issues such as abortion and capital punishment, the CPA spent the crucial first year of occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate needs of a postwar nation: flat taxes instead of electricity and deregulated health care instead of emergency medical supplies.

In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate portrait of life inside this Oz-like bubble, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside. This is a quietly devastating tale of imperial folly, and the definitive history of those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:41:18 -0500)

(see all 4 descriptions)

In this unprecedented account, the Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief, Raviv Chandrasekaran, takes us with him into the Green Zone, headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq. In this bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America were a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, a shopping mall, and a parking lot filled with shiny new SUV's, much of it run by Halliburton. The country is put into the hands of inexperienced twentysomethings chosen for their Republican Party loyalty. Ignoring what Iraqis say they want or need, the team pursues irrelevant neoconservative solutions and pie-in-the-sky policies instead of rebuilding looted buildings and restoring electricity. Their almost comic initiatives anger the locals and fuel the insurgency. Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up.… (more)

» see all 4 descriptions

Quick Links

Swap Ebooks Audio
39 avail.
105 wanted
4 pay7 pay

Popular covers

Rating

Average: (4.08)
0.5
1 1
1.5
2 7
2.5 1
3 28
3.5 22
4 114
4.5 18
5 70

Audible.com

Two editions of this book were published by Audible.com.

See editions

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

Help/FAQs | About | Privacy/Terms | Blog | Contact | LibraryThing.com | APIs | WikiThing | Common Knowledge | Legacy Libraries | 81,967,482 books!