Green light for 'Emerald'

To avoid the deadly kiss of surface-to-air missiles, the twin-propellered Hercules aircraft conveying me to Baghdad in January 2004 spun in tight corkscrews as it came in to land. As the plane touched down in the bleak desert landscape amid dusty bombed-out bunkers, I began to wonder what I had gotten myself into.

I had arrived in the five-square-mile area of Baghdad where I would spend over a year living and working, first as a press officer for America's occupation government, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and later as spokeswoman for the British Embassy. And so I entered the "Green Zone," as brilliantly dissected in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's fascinating and significant new book, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City – inside Iraq's Green Zone". This was the subject of Chandrasekaran's talk before a full auditorium at the Wilson School on Sept. 28.

A read which is by turns gripping, sobering, tragic and comic, Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an acutely observed and meticulously reported account of how the United States attempted to build an Iraq that would be a shining example of democracy and development in the Arab world, and why this failed. The picture it draws of American decision-making in Iraq is disturbing, and as a former CPA staffer, it is difficult to read the book without wincing.

Chandrasekaran was the Washington Post's bureau chief in Iraq both before the war and during the occupation, and I first met him through one of his regular visits to the "Strategic Communications" office in the Palace. His easy manner and disarming smile concealed his determination not to be put off by Coalition spin.

Chandrasekaran reported the book both using his notes from Iraq and from extensive interviews with former CPA staffers when returned to the United States. "I like to joke that I gave people from the CPA some free therapy," he told me.

The book takes us inside the Green Zone in a way that no other Iraq book has so far attempted. Chandrasekaran paints a vivid portrait of a military base intended to feel like a "Little America," where the cafeteria served pork and hot dogs, where no one minded if women wore spaghetti-strap tops, and liquor could bought freely—despite the fact that all these things were offensive to the CPA's Muslim Iraqi staff.

Closures of roads around the compound ensured that traffic snarled elsewhere in the city, Chandrasekaran writes, and because of the security threats, Iraqis were subjected to a series of humiliating pat-down checks as they entered to go home or to work. As temperatures soared and Baghdad homes, once air-conditioned, were left sweltering due to the lack of electricity, Green Zone residents enjoyed close to 24-hour power.

"From inside the Green Zone, the real Baghdad – the checkpoints, the bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing traffic jams – could have been a world away," Chandesrekaran writes. "The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin's call to prayer, never drifted over the walls."

The book's vignettes of twenty-first century imperial life are fascinating in themselves. But it is Chandrasekaran's account of how the occupation was run, from both inside the Palace and from Washington, that really demands attention. The descriptions of Pentagon versus State infighting over appointments, and of key meetings between the Coalition's Chief Administrator L Paul Bremer III and President Bush's Cabinet are eyeopening even to someone who was present in Iraq during the time most of these decisions were being made.

Some of the revelations are, or should be, shocking. It was obvious that many of my U.S. colleagues in the Palace had Republican political connections. Some of them had photographs pinned to their desk partitions, showing them posing with a smiling President Bush. But Chandrasekaran argues that in some cases cronyism, not credentials, was the only criterion for hiring. He describes how James O'Beirne, the White House liaison in the Pentagon, and his deputies screened potential recruits not for their expertise in post-conflict reconstruction, but for their Republican voting records and views on abortion. Worse, the Pentagon ensured that well-qualified people were removed from their positions to make way for the politically pliant.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City notes that such a recruitment strategy was unlikely to lead to the best-qualified people. The result was a group of inexperienced political appointees in key jobs, such as the pleasant but hapless 24-year-old Jay Hallen, who was given the task of reconstructing Iraq's stock exchange, despite the fact he had no background in financial services; Bernie Kerik, New York's police commissioner who had distinguished himself on September 11 and became responsible for overhauling Iraq's ruined police force, although he had no experience in post-conflict policing; and Roman Martinez, another 24-year-old, who had landed a job in Doug Feith's office in the Pentagon and then became a favored political aide of Bremer.

Chandrasekaran describes how the early failures of the CPA were not inevitable. Some of Bremer's poor decisions have been well-documented, such as de-Ba'athification, which barred any Iraqi who had held a position in Saddam's Ba'ath party from a government job, immediately stripping Iraq's schools of teachers and Iraq's ministries of seasoned administrators; and disbandment of the Iraqi Army, which helped swell the ranks of the insurgency.

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But the book also lays bare other serious mistakes, such as the CPA Governance Team's failure to understand the important role of Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani, the cleric who is the spiritual and political guide to Iraq's majority Shi'ite population. Staffers wasted valuable time and effort on a complicated plan to hand over Iraq's sovereignty that Sistani immediately rejected.

The story of Custer Battles, the self-styled security firm which gained the contract to protect Iraq's airport and overcharged the CPA millions of dollars of Iraqi oil funds in the process, is another cautionary tale. To date, Custer Battles have not been charged with a crime since they were not taking U.S. federal government money.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City is a balanced book. When Chandrasekaran takes aim at the worst culprits in the CPA, he is careful to ensure their characters are richly drawn. He takes pains to point out that there were CPA officials who understood that Iraq needed basic development, not Jeffersonian democracy: for example Alex Dehgan, who established a center for former WMD scientists to network so they would not turn to Iran; Ambassador Chris Ross, one of the State Department's premier experts on the region; and Steve Browning, a US Army Corps of Engineers specialist who tried to ensure that hospitals had drugs and basic supplies.

Chandrasekaran also gives due respect to the US military, and his adrenaline-filled account of the heroism of soldiers in the First Cavalry Division as they came under fire in Sadr City is war reporting at its finest.

Nonetheless, there are places where Chandrasekaran overcooks his product. Only towards the end of the story does he point out that the Green Zone, although safer for westerners than the rest of Baghdad, was also a dangerous place. (The rest of Iraq was known, without much irony, as the Red Zone). The Green Zone was subject to rocket and mortar fire almost nightly during my time in Iraq.

The suggestion that CPA staff never left the Palace is also hyperbole: although there were some who did live very sheltered lives, there were others who left "the bubble" regularly and were committed to helping Iraq stand on its own feet.

The British contingent left the Green Zone on a daily basis for meetings with Iraqis, except when specific security threats prevented it. I knew Americans who also took considerable risks to reach out to Iraqis – for example, Kevin Wolflein, an investment banker who helped Iraqis link up their fledgling private banking system. The threats were very real: in one of the worst incidents suffered by the United Kingdom, a staff member and his security guard were killed by a homemade bomb which exploded under their car as they returned from visiting the Oil Ministry.

Chandrasekaran's chatty style is highly engaging, but there are places in which his tone is tinged with contempt. This seems unnecessary. No matter the political leanings of CPA staffers, or the folly of the enterprise: the fact is they were risking their lives in Baghdad for the United States.

To give Chandrasekaran his due, he acknowledged this point at the Wilson School talk in response to a question from the audience, saying "I don't doubt the good intentions of all the civilians that showed up there." His failure to make this clear in the book opens him up to criticism from people who would like to dismiss Imperial Life in the Emerald City as a partisan attack. It is not, and Chandrasekaran should be admired for his courage in holding decision-makers to account. But the occasionally mocking characterizations give critics space to challenge the central tenet of the book – that the CPA failed, and the occupation of Iraq failed – on partisan grounds.

Chandrasekaran's conclusion is devastating: "Freed from the grip of their dictator, the Iraqis believed that they should have been free to chart their own destiny, to select their own interim government, and to manage the reconstruction of their shattered nation," he writes. "Doing a better job of governance and reconstruction almost certainly would have kept many Iraqis from taking up arms against their new leaders and the Americans."

Chandrasekaran demonstrates convincingly that the CPA could have adopted a pragmatic vision for Iraq – one in which Iraqis would have hospitals with basic equipment and drugs, in which schools would have desks along with former Ba'athist teachers and out-of-date textbooks, and in which Iraq would have a police force that, while corrupt, would not have morphed into sectarian death squads.

Instead, argues Chandrasekaran, the CPA's ambition led it to a vision of Iraq that was fundamentally unattainable – of Iraq as a shining beacon of Dubai-style infrastructure, liberal democracy and western attitudes. Imperial Life in the Emerald City makes a convincing case that was a chimaera, and that we should have known better from the beginning. It should be required reading for all budding nation-builders.