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BOOK
REVIEW
Operation bungle Iraq
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv
Chandrasekaran
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
Books on Iraq have become a growth industry since the US-led
invasion in 2003. So much has been written on Iraq that one
might want to be spared yet another marginal addition to the
genre. Yet when an outstanding journalist with impeccable
credentials such as the Washington Post's Rajiv
Chandrasekaran has an offering, it promises to count as a
crucial, not marginal, contribution. His account of the
nature and failings of the US occupation administration in
Iraq is worth multiple readings for depicting reality from
an objective, non-ideological stance.
Set in the 18-square-kilometer, overwhelmingly male American
enclave in central Baghdad known as the Green Zone,
Chandrasekaran's book opens with a description of the
colonial trappings of the US Coalition Provisional
Authority. The CPA headquartered in ousted dictator Saddam
Hussein's Republican Palace, which was managed by
Halliburton, the US defense contracting firm reaping the
spoils of war, courtesy of neo-conservative nepotism. Hired
for hundreds of millions of US dollars to provide "living
support services" to the CPA, Halliburton set up "the same
sort of bubble that American oil companies build for their
workers in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Indonesia". (p16)
Most CPA staff members had never worked outside the US and
were hired on the basis of connections to Republican
congressmen, conservative think-tanks and George W Bush-Dick
Cheney re-election contributors. Fenced into the sterilized
safety of the Green Zone, CPA officials referred to the rest
of Baghdad as the "Red Zone" where "bad guys might choose to
attack". (p 19) The real Baghdad with its frightful
lawlessness and privation was wished away dreamily as
another world. As war raged viciously all around, one could
"hear stories with happy endings like the interim
constitution and the democracy project". (p 21) Denied
unvarnished sources of information about happenings, CPA
staffers ludicrously "kept abreast of developments in Iraq
by watching Fox News and reading Stars and Stripes, which
was printed in Germany". (p.25)
The CPA's predecessor, the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was assembled haphazardly
and overloaded with personnel with little experience in the
Middle East and in nation-building. Many had no exposure to
conflict situations and were "clueless as to what to do". (p
35) ORHA was plagued with internecine squabbling between the
Pentagon and the State Department over appointments and
priorities. Knowledgeable figures were chased out through
the over-politicized interference of defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. The US Army did
not care to help ORHA with logistics and security. ORHA head
Joel Garner struggled simultaneously to please the Pentagon
and not irritate the State Department. Lacking a political
transition plan for Iraq, he was "set up to fail". (p 55)
Garner's successor, viceroy Paul Bremer of the CPA, wanted
the United States to be as ambitious in Iraq as it had been
in post-World War II Germany and Japan. A control freak who
earned his spurs under Henry Kissinger, Bremer gathered a
coterie of sycophantic young aides who never challenged his
grandiose schemes and edicts. His functioning style was
"don't contradict me". (p 65) Adamant that a permanent
constitution should precede elections, Bremer brushed off
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's demand for the reverse
sequence and stuck to his "awfully unrealistic"
handover-of-sovereignty blueprint.
Bremer's unseasoned advisers tried to right Saddam's wrongs
by favoring the once-oppressed Shi'ites at the expense of
the once-ruling Sunnis and bungled enough to worsen fragile
sectarian relations. His move to padlock the newspaper
office of firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was a "profound
miscalculation" that triggered a massive uprising and opened
a new front. (p 273) "Bremer's approach magnified rather
than muted the very divisions that so many Iraqis rejected."
(p 285) Nationalistic Iraqis suspected a Lebanon-like
fragmented future under Bremer's arrogant vision. His
overzealous de-Ba'athification policy was "not open for
discussion" and had disastrous consequences. With one scrawl
of his pen, the former Iraqi army, navy, Defense Ministry
and intelligence service were disbanded. Angry pink-slipped
soldiers "are all insurgents now". (p 77)
Bernie Kerik, the CPA's foreign policy adviser, "didn't
listen to anything, hadn't read anything" and spent his time
giving interviews saying that "the situation was improving".
(p 86) His controversial tactics of arming Iraqi
paramilitaries to restore law and order amplified the
problems and led an American observer to comment that "he
was the wrong guy at the wrong time". (p 87) The right
persons were never tapped for CPA to be efficient.
The CPA economic team's obsession with crafting a
free-market economy in Iraq had little resonance on the
streets. Iraqis were wary of full foreign ownership of
domestic businesses and privatization of the oil industry.
For the public, the biggest problem was unemployment, not
rapid non-transparent privatization that the CPA was rooting
for. On being told that international law prohibited an
occupation government from selling assets, Thomas Foley,
head of the CPA's private-sector initiative, retorted, "I
don't give a shit about international law." (p 126)
The economic team also studied harebrained ideas of issuing
Iraqis debit cards for rations in a country with no
automated teller machines. The CPA official in charge of the
Iraqi stock exchange conjured up fancy ideals of
computerization and new securities laws when the need was
for blackboards. In the words of one Iraqi broker peeved at
the non-practicality of it all, "Those CPA people reminded
me of Lawrence of Arabia." (p 232)
The CPA's public relations office "never conceded a mistake
and spun failures into successes to the point of absurdity".
(p 129) It ran the new Iraqi Media Network as a crude
propaganda tool with the logic that "we're paying for it, so
we can decide what airs". (p 134)
Chandrasekaran delves into the murky world of fraudulent
private security contractors who were subcontracted by the
CPA in Iraq and earn inflated profits using false invoices.
Some of them collected weapons seized by the US military and
shipped materiel out of Iraq for sale. The weaponry they
possessed and used was legally verboten. "They were
above the laws of war." (p 146)
Throughout his stint in Iraq, Bremer insisted that power
shortages would end soon, but it never happened. Prewar US
statements hid the enormity of Iraq's infrastructure failure
by positing that oil revenues could finance reconstruction.
Until the Green Zone itself began to be hit by insurgent
attacks, the CPA dished out the myth that "the country was
becoming safer by the day", discrediting itself as an entity
wallowing in make-believe. (p 179)
Iraq's health-care resuscitation was in the hands of James
Haveman, who wasted previous resources on an anti-smoking
campaign instead of raising awareness on preventing
childhood diarrhea and fatal maladies. According to one
American pharmacist, "Haveman and his advisers really didn't
know what they were doing and viewed Iraq as Michigan after
a huge attack." (p 216) The CPA's health measures were
evaluated by the Iraqi minister of health as "a fool's
errand". (p 219) The pity was that men like Haveman were
untouchable by virtue of their ties to the Bush
administration.
The Pentagon and the CPA were blind to the dangers posed by
disaffected Iraqi nuclear scientists after the fall of
Saddam and treated the matter as part of the de-Ba'athification
purges. Parallel State Department attempts to gently
reorient the scientists were blockaded in Iraq by fellow
Americans. The Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq Survey
Group searching for elusive weapons of mass destruction even
threatened Americans aiming to achieve a soft landing for
the scientists. One American general commented, "The CPA's
missteps cost us one very valuable year." (p 289)
CPA officials assumed that change could be brought about
simply by drafting laws, as it happens in the US. Bremer
learned very late in the day that conceiving an inanity "in
Washington and ramming it down the throats of Iraqis didn't
work". (p 41) United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi's
assistant told Chandrasekaran that "the story of the
Americans in Iraq is of missed opportunities". (p 246) One
pensive CPA member recalled after Iraq was "handed over" to
an interim government, "We were so busy trying to build a
Jeffersonian democracy and a capitalist economy that we
neglected the big picture." (p 276)
Chandrasekaran perorates his remarkable book of discoveries
with the reality-check that Iraq did not require "a
full-scale occupation with imperial Americans cloistered in
a palace of the tyrant". (p 290) One is left wondering
whether there was a method in the madness and if the chaos
that the CPA's ineptness bequeathed to Iraq was intentional.
This book goes a long way in shattering the belief that the
US is a benign hegemon resurrecting broken countries with
finesse. That Americans can be blunderbusses despite the
brouhaha is being borne out by the unspeakable human tragedy
of Iraq.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green
Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A Knopf, New York,
September 2006. ISBN: 1-4000-4487-1. Price: US$25.95, 320
pages.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
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