Rajiv Chandrasekaran

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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.) show less

The enormity of the incompetence and insanity of the American occupation of Iraq is difficult to grasp, but Chandrasekaran gives us a pretty good picture of the 15 month misrule that was the Coalition Provisional Authority. The CPA started out small, without resources or personnel, and never improved, as short-timers selected primarily for their loyalty to the Bush Administration rather than any expertise in reconstruction or Iraq rotated through. There was just enough energy to implement show more yet another inane privatization scheme or meaningless law, but not enough to build civic institutions or repair the damage caused by decades of Saddam's neglect, the war, and looting. CPA staffers lived in an Americanized bubble, protected by 17 foot blast walls and armed guards, and almost never got out into the real Iraq.

Some people come off better than I expected. I always thought L. Paul Bremer was a "heckuva job, Brownie!"-style incompetent, but he was actually a legitimate diplomatic professional, albeit a micromanager with far too broad of a mandate, forced to push a delusional agenda, and without good coordination with the military. Chandasekaran points out the few successes where he finds them: Haliburton's excellent customer service for Green Zone workers; a successful science diplomacy effort by State/AAAS fellow Alex Dehgan; some of the crisis-management in public health and electrification by Stephen Browning, a US Army Corps of Engineers engineer who headed five ministries. Mostly though, the story is of economic shock therapy gone nuts: Privatizing Iraq's state owned industries in the blind faith that the Free Market would sort it out (the Free Market decided no deal was worth getting shot and declined to invest). A public health manager who focused on a new national pharmacy formulary and anti-smoking campaign when Iraq's trauma care was collapsing under the insurgency. The utter shambles of picking politicians, which exacerbated Iraq's sectional tensions. In almost every instance, mismanagement and incompetence carried the day, giving the insurgency vital space to develop.

Chandasekaran is an excellent reporter, which is part of why this book gets just four stars. There are a finely detailed moments, but they're disconnected from a broader theory of reconstruction or narrative arc (aside from 'bad to worse'). The Green Zone was a profoundly weird place, as the dozen or vignettes of daily life show, but Chandasekaran is too much of a professional to go full gonzo. I've heard it say that reporting is history's first draft, and this is a great first draft, but we're still waiting for the final edition. show less

As he did in his book on the Green Zone in Iraq, Chandrasekaran blisteringly reveals American arrogance, wastefulness, and infighting leading to incompetent planning and execution of the mission/s (because people disagreed about what the idea was) in Afghanistan. It’s hard to pick out the most awful part, but my candidate is the way that USAID repeatedly stopped projects to get Afghan farmers growing cotton—a cash crop that they really could have sold in-country in place of opium show more poppies—because Afghan cotton might someday, theoretically, compete with American cotton. Because that’s really much more important than cutting off the Taliban’s funding and providing Afghan farmers with a sustainable crop! show less