When the Emerald City Ruled the Tigris

The University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy has just published my review of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s modern classic on the folly of Iraq, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone.”  The book has garnered several awards; you can read an excerpt from the first chapter “Versailles on the Tigris” here, on the author’s website.

The timing is appropriate: almost five years ago to the day, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tapped L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer to head what was to become the Coalition Provisional Authority – the CPA, which is the centerpiece of “Imperial Life.”  The CPA existed for little more than a year, then handed over “sovereignty” to the “government” of "Iraq."  But not before publishing, as the Americans were packing their bags, a compendium still available on its archived website, “AN HISTORIC REVIEW OF CPA ACCOMPLISHMENTS,” which ends with this wonderful table of “comparative reconstruction milestones for post-Saddam Iraq and post-WWII Germany.”
                                                                   IRAQ                    GERMANY

Local Governments Installed                2 Months                8 Months
Independent Central Bank                    2 Months                3 Years
Police Established                               2 Months               14 Months
New Currency                                      2 ½ Months            3 Years
Training a new Military                          3 Months               10 Years
Major reconstruction plan                      4 Months               3 Years
Cabinet Seated                                    4 Months               14 Months
Full Sovereignty                                   1 Year                   10 Years
New Constitution                                  2 ½ Years              4 Years
National Elections                                3 Years                  4 Years
War Trials                                            Pending                 6 Months

And you thought Germany was a success story!  Readers who appreciate Chandrasekaran’s tragicomic realism will also appreciate the CPA’s magic surrealism; the 72 page CPA list of accomplishments is a ministry by ministry checklist of “progress” that might have escaped your attention in the ensuing five years.

Matt Armstrong of MountainRunner deemed Chandrasekaran's depiction of the first year of the American occupation of Iraq "instructive on how to create an insurgency through occupation."  Whether it's the Occupation that created the Insurgency, or simply the Invasion that inevitably led to Resistance, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” is a timeless work on this crucial period.  Its portrait of hubris in the early days of the American “Iraq era” has already come to serve as a reference, much as “The Ugly American” and the “Quiet American” are synonymous with the American misadventure in Vietnam.