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Inside Iraq's Green Zone
Knopf
September 2006
On Sale: September 19, 2006
336 pages
ISBN: 1400044871
EAN: 9781400044870
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Political
An unprecedented account of life in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a
walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and
sparkling swimming pools that was the headquarters for the
American occupation of Iraq.
The Washington
Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran
takes us with him into the Zone: into a bubble, cut off from
wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a
devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little
America—a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco
where women showed up in hot pants, a movie theater that
screened shoot-’em-up films, an all-you-could-eat buffet
piled high with pork, a shopping mall that sold pornographic
movies, a parking lot filled with shiny new SUVs, and a
snappy dry-cleaning service—much of it run by Halliburton.
Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for
fear they would blow it up.
Drawing on hundreds
of interviews and internal documents, Chandrasekaran tells
the story of the people and ideas that inhabited the Green
Zone during the occupation, from the imperial viceroy L.
Paul Bremer III to the fleet of twentysomethings hired to
implement the idea that Americans could build a Jeffersonian
democracy in an embattled Middle Eastern country.
In the vacuum of postwar planning, Bremer ignores what
Iraqis tell him they want or need and instead pursues
irrelevant neoconservative solutions—a flat tax, a sell-off
of Iraqi government assets, and an end to food rationing.
His underlings spend their days drawing up pie-in-the-sky
policies, among them a new traffic code and a law protecting
microchip designs, instead of rebuilding looted buildings
and restoring electricity production. His almost comic
initiatives anger the locals and help fuel the
insurgency.
Chandrasekaran details Bernard
Kerik’s ludicrous attempt to train the Iraqi police and
brings to light lesser known but typical travesties: the
case of the twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in
finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad’s stock
exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid
millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department
employee forced to bribe Americans to enlist their help in
preventing Iraqi weapons scientists from defecting to Iran;
Americans willing to serve in Iraq screened by White House
officials for their views on Roe v. Wade; people
with prior expertise in the Middle East excluded in
favor of lesser-qualified Republican Party loyalists.
Finally, he describes Bremer’s ignominious departure in
2004, fleeing secretly in a helicopter two days ahead of
schedule.
This is a startling portrait of an Oz-like
place where a vital aspect of our government’s folly in Iraq
played out. It is a book certain to be talked about for
years to come.
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