Riveting tale of misrule
Himmat Singh Gill

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Bloomsbury, London. Pages 356. £37.75.

This is the story of the first 12 months of the American (mis)rule by the L. Paul Bremer-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, by a journalist who saw it all happen from a very close and perceptive range. Doomed to failure because of a wrong and warped understanding of a wounded Iraqi psyche, where the invading Army was seen by the majority as cruel occupiers of their land, and where the Americans tried to impose their peculiar brand of ushering in total democracy to a hungry and frightened populace that craved for just one night of sleep without fear of death, this is a sad commentary on the brutal realty of the fate of nations that come to lose their freedom and sovereignty. Much like in Afghanistan, where a brand of westernised approach to governance and reconstruction has left the common Afghan gasping for breath. Bremer and his boys imported in straight from the US and operating from the exclusive and heavily protected Green Zone in the capital city, ended up spending "more than $1.6 billion (of which) had been used to pay Halliburton, primarily for trucking fuel into Iraq". Imagine Iraq an exporter in oil having to spend on fuel!

The Iraqis had always wanted to be freed from the dictatorship and the cruel regime of Saddam, but after he was deposed they wanted their own kind of rule and governance by their own chosen people, not those Shias or Sunni leaders imposed upon them by outsiders who in any case had to leave one day. What they got in return, according to the author, was "a full-scale occupation with imperial Americans cloistered in a palace of the tyrant, eating bacon and drinking beer, surrounded by Gurkhas and blast walls."

Despite the rising casualties to troops and civilians in war-torn Iraq and an end to the continuous struggle between the Pentagon and the State Department during the Bremer days, real peace can only come when the Iraqis themselves begin to start having faith in their elected or nominated representatives. The Kurdish dominance in the North and the Sunni anger with a predominant Shia ruling class have not made matters any easier for the present rulers, and what makes matters worse is the ground reality of the Baath Party not having gone entirely defunct. This proves quite clearly that outsiders may be able to conquer a land, but cannot guarantee good governance by remote control.

Rajiv who worked for the Washington Post has highlighted the futility of running a Baghdad traffic system on the lines of the Maryland state model downloaded straight from the Net, and the strategic blunder made by the Bremer regime in disbanding the entire Iraqi army in one go. Such costly mistakes will continue to be made when civilian bureaucrats and corporate techies are called upon to handle a land in the middle of a civil war or worse. This is an engrossing account of the early American attempts at giving the Iraqis a home rule that they (the US administration) deemed appropriate for the country, and the cost that the commoner always has to pay when their country is invaded for one reason or the other.

HOME