Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006) — a micro book review

03 November 2016

An excellent description of how cultural arrogance and political cronyism guaranteed a strategic failure in Iraq

Washington Post editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book — Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Alfred Knopf, 2006) — shows what happens when preconceptions, lack of planning, and arrogant nitwitism meet the task of post-war reconstruction.

The book's second paragraph hints at the politicized stupidity that did us in:

None of the succulent tomatoes or the crisp cucumbers grown in Iraq made it into the salad bar. U.S. government regulations dictated that everything, even the water in which hot dogs were boiled, be shipped in from approved suppliers in other nations.

I guess the plan was to rebuild the Iraqi economy by taking all American business elsewhere and at a grossly inflated cost to the American taxpayer.

Peculiar logic like this characterized the occupation.

Inferred theme

In his last pages, the author quotes Iraqi politician Adel Abdel-Mahdi, who had been on the governing council that had had to cope with the Coalition Provisional Authority's many missteps:

The biggest mistake of the occupation was the occupation itself.

The Iraqi leader (and the author) are saying that the occupation was so badly bungled that both nations would have been better off, had the U.S. left Iraq alone to cope with its emergence from the war's rubble.

A stylistic caveat — wandering chronology, repetitiveness and poor documentation

True to prevailing journalistic form, Emerald City bounces erratically back and forth through time — often bringing up the same people and the same events repeatedly and disconnectedly — for no apparently good reason.

And from a scholarly perspective, the book's documentation is close to worthless. This may have been unavoidable, given the interview sources' wish for anonymity.

What few citations there are, are not conveniently anchored to the text. One has to guess what might have sourced and go to the back of the book to see. There is often nothing there.

That said . . .

The book's strengths much outweigh its stylistic shortcomings

One can get the big picture from the book's scattered glimpses. Chandrasekaran is an absolute master at characterizing the many players and cogs in the occupation government and its Iraqi targets.

Readers interested in details of personal and professional character, political cronyism, ideologically based economic stupidity, institutionally supported profiteering, and incessant bureaucratic infighting will find the author's many vignettes revealing.

The Coalition Provisional Authority's major mistakes are well documented in these pages.

Overall, I found Emerald City to be an unusually engaging and informative read.

Writing samples

Below is an extract dealing with the damaging political cronyism that the Bush Administration consistently indulged. The passage illustrates the author's writing style, as well as his ability to juxtapose incompatibles to make a point:

Once the Americans arrived, the job of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system fell to Frederick M. Burkle, Jr., a physician with a master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Burkle was a naval reserve officer with two Bronze Stars and a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues.

During the first Gulf War, he provided medical aid to Kurds in northern Iraq. He had worked in Kosovo and Somalia. And in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, he had been put in charge of organizing the American response to the expected public health crisis in Iraq.

A USAID colleague called him the 'single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government."

A week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed that he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID told him that the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job.

Burkle's job was handed to James K. Haveman, Jr., a sixty-year-old social worker who was largely unknown among international health experts. He had no medical degree, but he had conections. he had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to [neocon Paul] Wolfowitz.

Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world. Prior to his stint in government, Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.

Haveman, as one might have predicted, decided that Iraq's socialized way of dealing with health was un-American. He began to privatize everything.

An offshoot of this effort was the decision to replace Iraq's existing (and reportedly already sensible) drug formulary with a shorter one. This took time and diverted attention from Iraq's more acute medical problems:

40 percent of the nine hundred drugs deemed essential by the ministry [of health] were out of stock in hospitals.

Of the thirty-two drugs used in public clinics for the management of chronic diseases, twenty-six were unavailable.

"We didn't need a new formulary. We needed drugs," [the Iraqi minister of health, Aladdin Alwan] said. "But the Americans did not understand that."

On a larger scale

Similarly colossal mistakes occurred with regard to the reestablishment of electrical power, water provision, and safety in the streets.

The Provisional Authority's emphasis on remaking Iraq into the image of America diverted effort from Iraq's most obviously immediate problems. We tinkered with unimportant minutiae while Iraqis huddled, waterless, in the dark. Fine impression that made.

Bungled nation building?

The author concludes that:

[D]oing a better job of governance and reconstruction almost certainly would have kept many Iraqis from taking up arms . . . .

There still would have been an insurgency . . . but perhaps it would have been smaller and more containable.

"If this place succeeds," a CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] friend told me before he left, "it will be in spite of what we did, not because of it."

Remarkable people

On the bright side, there are some admirable people in this book. Chandrasekaran describes them thoroughly enough to emulate. It is a pity that most of them were squashed by the Bush Administration's blind spots. (Not to say that other administrations are not similarly hampered.)

Highly recommended

Despite my quibbles with the book's meandering organization, Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an admirably worthwhile record of the ill effects of our cultural arrogance and its companion political inbreeding.

Emerald City will look familiar to other nations that have suffered our well-meaning boots. Good intent, skill and sense often do not overlap. Humility is undervalued.

PeteFree.com

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006) — a micro book review