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

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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.) ( )

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? ( )