Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Knopf, ISBN 978-1-4000-4487-0)
Parochialism run amok
Review by Lawrence I. Charters, January 29, 2007
Much has been said about fighting a war in the Middle East without any sense of sacrifice at home. The Administration asked for no new tax support, no conservation measures, no rubber or steel or aluminum drives to support the war effort. The war has been reduced to nightly snippets on the news, and seems to be fought most fiercely on Fox TV, where the enemy is clearly shown to be not terrorist but, apparently, opponents of the Administration.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City mentions this in passing, but the focus is on parochialism: the amazing story of attempting to fight a war, and establish a new government in Iraq, using people with no experience in either war or civil administration or, apparently, foreign travel. Those experienced in foreign affairs, foreign laws, foreign customs, and in fact anything foreign (with “foreign” being defined as “something not commonplace in a metropolitan US city”) are excluded from power, and party loyalists — not Communist party loyalists, but Republican party loyalists — are given the keys to the war, and the reconstruction.
The focus is on the viceroyship of L. Paul Bremer, the snazzily-dressed businessman appointed by George W. Bush to head up the American administration in Iraq and, by extension, head up the Iraq government. Chandrasekaran doesn’t spend much time on Bremer himself so much as on trying to track down where money was being spent, what policies were created, what programs were created, and who was creating the policies and programs, and spending the money. Very well written, it places a human face on the war, and that face looks like middle class America — at least as far as the American see it.
Update
The Bush Administration did not think too much of this book, and sent out various talking heads to criticize the book on TV talk shows. In the years since, however, much of the more controversial content has been proven to be accurate. The 2010 film Green Zone, starring Matt Damon, is based in part on the book.