Zone coverage
I
don’t read very much non-fiction - two in a row must be
almost a record - and certainly didn’t anticipate breaching
that limitation just to find out what I reckoned I already knew
about the war in Iraq. But Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s debut
was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and then went
on to win the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. I was sold.
On approaching Imperial Life in the Emerald
City, an account not of the war but of the American post-occupation
‘rebuilding’ of Iraq, it’s not hard to see the
author’s angle from the title down. Imperial suggests the
presence of a domineering empire, and Emerald City brings
to mind an analogy of the Americans in Iraq with the Wizard of
Oz: omnipotent but incompetent. In fact, as the subtitle suggests,
the book is about life in the fortified Green Zone, known to the
US civilian workforce as the ‘Emerald City’, and Imperial
relates to Saddam’s old palace where they were based.
The palace was the headquarters of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, the American occupation administration
in Iraq. From April 2003 to June 2004, the CPA ran Iraq’s
government - it enacted laws, printed currency, collected taxes,
deployed police, and spent oil revenue.
Not that this means Chandrasekaran isn’t editorialising
with the title, but it’s safe to assume that he’s
singing to the choir. The central charge is one made innumerable
times in the last five years: that the US had a plan for the war,
but none for the peace. As Chandrasekaran discovers, this isn’t
quite true: they did have a plan; it just wasn’t very good.
Oh, and they forgot to tell a lot of their staff what it was.
The main problem was that the CPA tried to do too
much: their aim effectively was to build a new country from the
bottom up. Or rather, from the top down, as it was their appointments
to the interim posts which would determine the course of the program.
Often these were people with little experience in the relevant
area, and they were replacing people who did know what they were
doing. The process of “De-Baathification of Iraq Society”
was intended to remove Saddam sidekicks from government, but they
failed to take account of the fact that many people were in the
Baath party through coercion and not choice, and the day after
the order was announced, the Health Ministry lost a third of its
staff, and some schools in Sunni dominated areas were left with
just one or two teachers: one US army engineer at that point was
running five ministries.
This decree was the work of Paul ‘Jerry’
Bremer, the US official who was effective head of government in
Iraq until handover of power in 2004. Another of his ideas was
to dismantle the security forces. Thousands of soldiers protested
against this, on the grounds that they were loyal to Iraq, not
to Saddam. Chandrasekaran caught up with a former soldier later
in 2003:
“What happened to everyone?”
I asked. “Did they join the new army?”
He laughed.
“They’re all insurgents now,”
he said. “Bremer lost his chance.”
This is one of the rare mentions of the insurgency
in the book, which for much of the time takes a more blackly humorous
look at the occupation. It’s like Catch-22 in there.
There were serious problems with electricity supply, healthcare,
policing and other basics of life, but the US had its eye on the
long game:
There was $4 million to create a nationwide
system of area codes and telephone numbers, $9 million for a
national ZIP code project, $19 million for a wireless internet
service, and $20 million for “catch-up business training”
that would “develop and train a cadre of entrepreneurs
in business fundamentals and concepts that were missing in the
former Iraqi regime.”
Another official in the CPA “urged the Health
Ministry to mount an anti-smoking campaign,” while members
of his team argued that their limited resources “would be
better used raising awareness about how to prevent childhood diarrhoea
and other fatal maladies.” The man charged with creating
a new traffic law for Iraq found inspiration by cutting and pasting
sections from the State of Maryland motor vehicle code.
A team from the State University of New York
at Stony Brook won a $4 million grant to “modernize curricula
in archaeology” at four of Iraq’s largest universities
- schools where students were sitting on the floor because they
lacked desks and chairs.
Chandrasekaran occasionally suffers from Michael
Moore syndrome, in making out that life in Iraq under Saddam was
pretty idyllic (”If you weren’t a dissident, Iraq’s
capital was one of the world’s safest cities”), and
exhibits true American surprise at the extent of pre-war Iraq’s
subsidised (or “socialist”) state: “Education,
even college, was free. So was health care.” Whoever heard
of such madness? The US was even more horrified by this, and set
about not repairing the country as they found it, but trying to
create a neo-conservative capitalist country from scratch, whatever
its history or circumstances.
One way of reducing subsidies was to cancel all
state-owned companies’ bank balances, whether credit or
debit, and let them start again as private companies from scratch
(really this was a ‘virtue’ born of necessity: there
wasn’t enough money to pay the deposits and the US feared
a run on the state bank). This clean slate approach meant, as
one US official pointed out, that:
the very companies that were the dogs you
got to take out back and shoot, benefited the most. Who owes
a bunch of money? Weak companies. Who had a bunch of money?
Strong companies. So we just reversed that. It was the exact
opposite of what we were trying to achieve.
The names of US personnel come and go through the
book, but they fall into two broad categories: those who see the
real world problems, and those who occupied an ideological bubble.
Sadly the latter were in charge, from the Oval Office right on
down:
A week after arriving, Foley told a contractor
from BearingPoint that he intended to privatize all of Iraq’s
state-owned enterprises within thirty days.
“There are a couple of problems with
that,” the contractor said. “The first is an international
law that prevents the sale of assets by an occupation government.”
“I don’t care about any of that
stuff,” Foley told the contractor… “I don’t
give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to
the president that I’d privatize Iraq’s businesses.”
The picture overall is of an administration which
took a country as its own playground and allowed it to deteriorate
into a war zone. Chandrasekaran’s book may be partial -
who knows how many interviewees he left out who thought the Americans
were doing a bang-up job? - but it looks certain to become the
first draft of history on this tiny part of an enormous and ongoing
subject.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
