Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Imperial Life in the Emerald City - Inside Iraq's Green Zone

Paperback: 365 pages
Publisher: Vintage 2007
ISBN: 978-307-27883-8

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's new book is a colorful story of the "boys in the bubble" - the Coalition Provisional Authority that took control of Iraq after the ousting of Saddam. The CPA was led by Lewis Paul Bremer III from April 2003 until June 2004.

CPA was centered in the Green Zone district of Baghdad, a former palace of Saddam that during the occupation turned into a walled American enclave. The planning of the post-intervention, post-Saddam Iraq was reactionary to the realities on the ground even if western and modern in vision. Everything was deemed to be easily done and straight-forward. Laws modelled on US equivalents were to be implemented from up down. Iraq was to be reconstructed as another American state: economy was to be shock-privatized and created as a Middle East equivalent of a modern Western free-market economy. De-ba'athification and disbanding the Iraq army were deemed to clear the table politically, create a new start for democratic Iraq. All good aims if one thinks abstractly but the possibilities of success, on short-term at least were slim. Intentions are not a sign of success. Reality - as experienced by ordinary Iraqis outside of the Green Zone, in the real Iraq - intervened. The power struggle between the different nations that had formed Iraq intensified, coalition-of-the-willing got bogged down and the future of a democratic (stable even) Iraq remains uncertain to say the least.

Chandrasekaran's book is written in style and is solid in facts. All in all, the story that unfolds is a stunning display of American ignorance and arrogance.