Imperial Life in the Emerald City

First of all--what a great title, right? While I'd love to take the credit, Imperial Life in the Emerald City is a fantastic book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran from Knopf. But don't just take my word for it, this puppy's been nominated for a National Book Award. Now what is the Emerald City, you may ask? Well, I would tell you, it's Green Zone in Baghdad--everyone's favorite war torn metropolis.

As you'd expect, it's a lambasting of the American (mis)management of Iraq in the months following the invasion. There are countless details about some of the dozens of bureaucratic clusterfucks that characterized the occupation, and they're all fascinating in a tragi-comic way. But Chandrasekaran also interviews dozens of Iraqis, and this really helps to remind us that this isn't merely some kind of inept social experiment or foreign policy gone wild, but people's lives that are being ruined. He really does a great (and relatively well-balanced) job at examining the positions of many different factions .

But don't for a moment think that he's saying that all the Americans there are malacious idiots. In fact this was the element of the book that most stuck with me--and that was how most of the Americans were depicted as being really innocent and blinded by their ideological good intentions. This was another real tragedy--that so many of these people gave their hearts (and often their lives) to rebuilding Iraq in America's image without being able seeing the forest from the trees.

Of course, this simply means that they weren't suited to the job, and never should have been send eight thousand miles away to rebuild a country they knew nothing about. Chandrasekaran makes it clear that the only qualification shared by the majority of the folks sent down there by Uncle Sam were that they were well connected neo-conservatives. In one case a 24-year-old was put in charge of reopening Baghdad's stock exchange (when I was 24 I was busy answering phones and photocopying--but don't think for a moment that I was less qualified than this kid).

No matter what your position on the war, this is a really interesting read. I feel sad for everyone involved--sure, some were more responsible than others, but in retrospect it's very easy to see what a little more effort at mutual understanding and appreciation of the big picture could have achieved. Here's to hoping we'll fare better in North Korea and Iran!