Imperial Life in the Emerald City - book review

Reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran created some unusual feelings for me. On one hand I felt disgusted at the waste of money and personnel as well as the bubble of non-reality that was created in the Green Zone. But then I realized just how much the book consists of sour grapes and Monday morning quarterbacking. It's easy to poke fun at the insular life inside the Green Zone but anyone who has lived abroad on a military base knows that is common, maybe universal. The whole concept is to allow the personnel temporarily assigned there feel as much at home as possible. I've know people who have been stationed in Germany who never met any Germans, for example.

Less easy to forgive is the idea that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CAP) could and did act as if they were running a game of Sim Country, setting up the country as if it were a simulation or a classroom exercise. But again this is par for the course in the military and probably for the secret thoughts of the overachieving politician. We know what's best for Iraq. We make the decisions. We get them back on course. Some of the members of the CPA were even delighted that so much looting and destruction took place after the invasion because that left a clean slate to build upon.

I think our education system deserves some of the blame as these well educated men (for the most part men) sought to impose "ideal" American solutions on a ruined economy and a devastated country with wildly different societal norms and historical values. Complete privatization of industry hasn't even been accomplished in the U.S. but the CPA was desperately trying to switch Iraq's economy from heavy government subsidization while at the same time trying to get it kick-started. But, here again, it is easier to point the finger after the fact. Events described in this book make it clear that there just wasn't much prior planning for post-invasion nation building and what little there was wasn't coordinated between U.S. government agencies and certainly not with the Iraqis.

I think the book is an excellent eye-opener for just how difficult it is to rebuild a country that has been so spectacularly damaged, especially if you have a team that is long on ideology and short on expertise. It reminds one of the Communist effort to rebuild post revolution Russia.