Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

[sinkingfeeling]

I would give this book 5 stars! It will make you angry, make you sad, and in my case, seek for ways to bring the guilty to justice!

The author was in Iraq from late 2002 until the after the CPA moved out in June 2004. Unlike the members of the CPA and their staff, Rajiv traveled throughout Baghdad and interviewed common Iraqis.

The story is of how the USA managed to destroy the entire social structure, infrastructure, economy, and lives of 25 million Iraqis.

"Under Saddam's Baathist government, state-owned factories produced a plethora of goods including school notebooks (which were so substandard that the pages fell out), car batteries (which weren't much better), leather coats (which were favored by members of the secret police). Government jobs either in a factory or a ministry or in the security services, were plentiful and guaranteed you a salary for the rest of your life. Paychecks were low, but the cost of most goods and services was subsidized by the government. Gasoline was sold for less than a nickel a gallon. Nobody paid for electricity, not even the state-owned factories that guzzled hundreds of megawatts. Every family received monthly food rations from the state. Education, even college, was free. So was health care. The price of fertilizer was so heavily subsidized that Iraqi farmers would often sell their annual allotment in Jordan and Syria instead of using it to grow crops; doing so took a truck and a few days, and it netted more money than spending months toiling in the fields.

Iraqis experienced an unparalleled degree of affluence because of the country's plentiful oil revenue. Before the 1991 Gulf War bankrupted and isolated the country, government run department stores managed by the Ministry of Trade sold Italian loafers, Pierre Cardin ties, and Breitling watches at a fraction of their retail price anywhere else in the world. International tickets on Iraqi Airways were subsidized, as were imported Volkswagens, Volvos, Mercedes-Benzes, and Chevrolets. In the 1970s and even into the early 1980s, before the apex of Iraq's eight-year war with neighboring Iran, Iraq's healthcare and university systems were regarded as the best in the Arab world. Tens of thousands of Egyptians, Somalis, Pakistanis, and Indians moved to Iraq to work on massive infrastructure projects: the construction of a six-lane highway to Jordan, luxury hotels in Baghdad, bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. "We had a very, very good life." Faez Ghani Aziz, the director of the vegetable oil factory, told me. "We were the richest country in the Middle East."

So, the USA invades, topples Saddam, leaves everything except the Oil Ministry unguarded to be looted and burnt, immediately disbands the Iraqi Army, and decides that anyone connected to the Baathist party should be fired. And that was just for starters. The Americans with Bremer at the head plays the role of unquestioned king and decides to remake the socialist Iraqi into a mini-America, complete with electronic stock market, a free global market, Maryland's traffic rules, and almost all reconstruction to be done by anyone other than Iraqis.

"....With search teams unable to turn up any weapons of mass destruction, the primary American justification for the invasion, the viceroy deemed the development of democracy to be no longer just an important goal. It was the goal."

However, they ignore the voices of Iraqis, the lack of electricity and clean water, the un-supplied hospitals, the growing number of unemployed, the payment of pensions, and distribution of food.

What was accomplished by the CPA was a squandering of American taxpayer dollars, the formation of ethic violence, an increased Sunni insurgency, and incalculable damage to the country of Iraq.

"...We never saw each other as Sunnis or Shiites first. We were Iraqis first," said Saad Jawad, a professor of political science at Baghdad University. "But the Americans changed all that. They made a point of categorizing people as Sunni or Shiite or Kurd."

One other note, you'll be thrilled to read how much the key Bush players, Rumsfeld, Feith, and Wolfowitz had a hand in this fiasco.

[wakeme2008]

1. good book read it two weeks ago...

I also posted about the Cat killers of Halliburton.... :(

[izzie]

2. I will look for it at the library and it looks good.

this is sort of funny when he is doing the same for 300 millions here. So The story is of how the USA managed to destroy the entire social structure, infrastructure, economy, and lives of 25 million Iraqis.

[NI4NI]

3. This book explains the real reason

for the Iraq failure, besides RumDumb troop mismanagement,

Our soldiers did their job successfully because they are professionals.
Chuckle Nutz conservative Republican appointees did not and failed miserably because they were all political cronies.

[politicat]

4. What totally astounded me was the level of DUH I kept running into....

Like the fact that the only person who had a streetmap of the city was the one Jay Garner picked up at a travel store in Bethesda. Shouldn't that have been standard equipment? Shouldn't some intern have been put down in front of Amazon.com a couple of weeks before they left to buy a few dozen copies of them? I actually felt sorry for Garner -- he was set up to fail, and the people who suffered were the people he was trying to help. I can pull down one from googlemaps, so there's no reason why they shouldn't have had them.

Agresto was one of my professors when I was in school (I spent a year at St. John's sister school, Thomas Aquinas, and he was a visiting prof that year) and I am really tempted to write to him to tell him how utterly disappointed I am with him. After all, the key thing that Great Books schools teach is not an appreciation for western culture, but the ability to reason and think critically. He went into that situation with his political blinders on rather than with the attitude of a scholar and let his political opinions lead when he should have let his mind lead. (He has a fine, flexible mind, but it is lamentably closed and I can't say I'm unhappy he's been mugged by reality. Would that it had happened sooner.)

I am utterly stunned by the sheer wastage of talent that the Military has displayed - their reservists should be using their real world skills, not shoveling refuse and driving VIPS around.

The biggest mistakes I think they made, though were these: No one should have been hired to go as CPA staff unless they already had foreign travel. Those who had to get passports to go to Iraq should never have been there. And they never should have shut themselves up in the Green Zone. There never should have been a green zone. If CPA staffers died because they were in a war zone, then they died because they were in a war zone. They knew that going in.

I knew this was was badly run and an exercise in bad planning, but I hadn't known how badly. Now I'm sorry I do. I may never get my eyes out of their rolled up position.

[pstans]

5. I am reading this book and agree...5 stars

The past few days I have been reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The book details life inside the Green Zone in Baghdad after the fall of Sadaam and the lack of a plan to rebuild Iraq.

As I have been reading, I have been unable to count how many times I have said "oh my God", "what the heck", or "what were they thinking". I would say it is probably been 2 to 3 times per page.

For example...

The recruiting process worked fastest when there were no requirements other than political loyalty. When Bremer's budget chief asked for "ten young goofers" to perform administrative tasks, O'Beirne's staff had a list of names at the ready. It included Simone Ledeen, the daughter of neoconservative commentator Michael Ledeen; Casey Wasson, a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children, and Todd Baldwin, a legislative aide for Republican senator Rick Santorum. A few days later, all ten received an e-mail from O'Bierne's office. It wasn't until they arrived in Baghdad that they discovered how they had come to the Pentagon's attention: they had all sent their resumes to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Because of the personnel shortage in Baghdad, six of the goofers were assigned to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they had no previous financial-management experience. They quickly earned the nickname the "Brat Pack."

When it came down to post-war planning the book seems to lay out two sides on the issue. On one side you had the State Department (Colin Powell) and the CIA that had people with years of experience in the Middle East and in rebuilding. Then you had Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield, whose principle motivation was to lace Ahmed Chalabi, who did not have a postive reputation around the State Department and CIA, as the new leader in Iraq. Rumsfield used Douglas Feith to coordinate post war planning and the book shows how Cheney and the Pentagon used the experts from the State Department and CIA only when they had to to keep Powell, Condi Rice, and the CIA off their back.

I highly recommend reading this book. If not the entire thing, then just read the first couple chapters. It will give you a better understanding of how much we messed the country of Iraq, how we failed at the most basics aspects of rebuilding the country, and how we turned the civilized nation into a land of chaos.

Originally posted at Century of the Common Iowan.

[HamdenRice]

6. The incompetence was too depressing for me to finish

I had to put it down. I guess I'll start again this week.