Imperial Life In The Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

From The Week of March 21, 2010

We can and will, as a society, debate the merits and the mistakes of the 2003 Iraq War. We'll attack it on grounds ideological, political and even practical, but we'll never come to a full understanding of it. There are some events in the world that are too complex and too secretive for us to individually digest. We will simply never have enough information to comprehend their truth. So what do we do? How do we come to grips with matters as important as these?

We can examine what life is like, on the ground, for the Iraqi people. Mr. Chandrasekaran endeavors to do just that by first exploring the Green Zone, the lavish, American, secured compound deep inside Baghdad, and then expanding his travels out into Baghdad proper, where the streets are dangerous, the rule of law dubious and the shattered lives as plentiful as sand in the dessert. Mr. Chandrasekaran chronicles a few of these beaten down Iraqis, descendants of a proud people now bowed under years of dictatorship and war. He follows their attempts to build new lives out of the rubble of their country while suicide bombs and American policies pound down around them.

Interwoven into these real world experiences is a history of the civilian occupation of Iraq. Mr. Chandrasekaran narrows his focus down to the vital decisions, under Paul Bremmer, that shaped the years to come, siting in particular the calamitous decision to disband the Iraq Army and send countless thousands of armed young men into the streets without any prospect for employment. A clusterfuck of the gravest order, a decision which surely defined the state of Iraqi life until 2007 when the troop surge and the Sunni Awakening began to knit some semblance of Iraqi life back together again.

Though Mr. Chandrasekaran is unsparingly critical of Mr. Bremmer and of the flawed decision making exhibited by his civil administration, he also communicates that, in many ways, there's simply no good way to go about nation-building a conquered country. A mixture of wounded pride and cultural miscommunication will inevitably doom all such efforts. A more nuanced approach is called for, not only to avoid the death and destruction that result from flawed policy, but to avoid the astronomical amounts of cash that have to be sunk into rebuilding a nation with any sort of success. Meanwhile, as Mr. Chandrasekaran so vividly portrays, Baghdad is divided between the slice of Americana that exists in the Green Zone and the lawless and war-torn world that suffers beyond its air-conditioned walls. (3/5 Stars)