Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Vintage Paperback, September 2007, $14.95
Reviewed by Gerald Loftus, "Avuncular American"
As we mark the fifth anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it is
worth revisiting that first year of the U.S. occupation. The Green
Zone of Chandrasekaran’s title has come to symbolize the entire Iraq
venture, the enclave where America tried to graft its national
narrative and institutions onto a Middle Eastern society, and then was
surprised at the transplant’s rejection. In the immediate aftermath of
the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, it is a time of striking
images and—in some corners of the neoconservative world—heady dreams of
remaking the Middle East in America’s mold. It’s the world of the
Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA, under “viceroy,” “proconsul,”
“presidential envoy,” or simply, as his official title said,
Administrator L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer.
Enter this world with Rajiv Chandrasekaran and prepare to… laugh. You
know you shouldn’t, but some of his vignettes on the heights of hubris
on the Tigris are so outrageously funny that you might weep. As you
should, for the absurd tragicomedy of life in the Green Zone is
rendered here as nowhere else. Funny but never flippant,
Chandrasekaran was The Washington Post Baghdad Bureau Chief before, during, and after the invasion.
Though there is shooting, this is not a “war story,” and most of the
fireworks are from policy conflicts within the blast-proof walls of the
American bunker. “Green Zone Scenes” provide illuminating
introductions to each chapter’s theme. There are good guys and gals
who earnestly try to contribute to rebuilding war-torn Iraq, though
many are completely out of their depth. The wounds are mostly
self-inflicted, and they are many: the Pentagon prohibits retired
general Jay Garner, the original post-conflict czar, from seeing the
multi-volume State Department “Future of Iraq” study; free marketeers
bent on privatizing Iraqi state-owned industry succeed in adding
thousands to the ranks of the unemployed. “A Deer In the Headlights,”
as one chapter is entitled, sums up the willful disregard for area
expertise, rejected in favor of ideological certainties.
My favorite vignette is on the public diplomacy skills of the CPA’s
police chief: “experts concluded that more than 6,600 foreign police
advisers should be sent to Iraq immediately. The White House
dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.” Kerik spent only a couple of months
in Iraq before returning to the U.S. and his ill-fated run for Homeland
Security Secretary. At one point he asks an aide, “who the [expletive deleted]
are these people?,” referring to a group of Iraqi judges, assembled at
the Palace to meet CPA counterparts. We are not told whether they
overheard Kerik.
Not all CPA staffers had such bad manners, but the mutual incomprehension was the same. Stratcomm (Strategic Communications, or the PR shop) had true believers in the civ-mil duo of Dan Senor and Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt; Chandrasekaran highlights one revealing press conference exchange with an Iraqi journalist:
Q: General Kimmitt, the sound of American helicopters, which fly so close to the ground, is terrifying young children, especially at night. Why do you insist on flying so low and scaring the Iraqi people?
A: What we would tell the children of Iraq is that the noise they hear is the sound of freedom. [Followed by 15 lines of similar sanctimonious sentiment.]
If Bremer was the lord of the Green Zone, Senor was the ruler of the
“Green Room,” as the Stratcomm home in the Republican Palace was
known. Senor, says Chandrasekaran, had a
“you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us attitude toward journalists.”
Chandrasekaran tells of seeing only Fox News switched on in Senor’s
office, and notes that Senor joined Fox post-CPA as a paid commentator
on Iraq.
Public diplomacy professionals will be further interested in the
in-depth treatment given to broadcast professional Don North and his
efforts to set up the Iraq Media Network (IMN). This
seat-of-the-pants, under-funded, misspent resources tale is emblematic
of the entire venture. Instead of a beacon of press freedom, said
North, “to some in the CPA, IMN was a propaganda tool: ‘we’re paying
for it, so we can decide what airs.’”
Chandrasekaran tells of media budgets blown to airlift in flashy
armored Humvees, when North was in dire need of basics like batteries
for TV cameras; of a staged “interview” of Bremer by Senor, which the
Iraqi IMN staff deemed “agitprop” and refused to air; and of a
CPA-imposed daily propaganda show, preempting the IMN news.
IMN, North concluded, “had become an irrelevant mouthpiece for CPA
propaganda, managed news, and mediocre programs.” In Washington,
President Bush talked about “engaging in the battle of ideas in the
Arab world.” But in Baghdad, North said, “We have already lost the
first round.”
As black-comedic as “Emerald City” often is, the overall theme is of
lost opportunities. Decisions—often based solely on received
ideological wisdom with no foundation in Middle Eastern realities—are
made, and the consequences are tragic. “A wasted year,” is the verdict
of several American and Iraqi insiders.
Many excellent books have been written—some admittedly weightier—on the
ambiguous venture called “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The strength of
“Emerald City” is in its anecdotes, for they provide a human backdrop
for well-known events like the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the
descent into anarchic looting. There are limits to the anecdotal
approach, however. In the chapter entitled “The Plan Unravels,” I wish
that Chandrasekaran had tried a bit less to explicate the meanders of
Bremer’s various constitutional, electoral, and institutional attempts
to impose his imprint on Iraqi politics. “Emerald City” is best read
as a nonfiction novel, and Chandrasekaran makes effective use of a
string of interviews with lesser-known CPA staffers, tracing their
efforts, whether heroic or misguided.
First published 24 April 2008 by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.