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2 BOOK REVIEW Operation
bungle Iraq Imperial
Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv
Chandrasekaran
Reviewed by Sreeram
Chaulia
Books on Iraq have become a growth
industry since the US-led invasion in 2003. So
much has been written on Iraq that one might want
to be spared yet another marginal addition to the
genre. Yet when an outstanding journalist with
impeccable credentials such as the Washington
Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran has an offering, it
promises to count as a crucial, not marginal,
contribution. His
account of the nature and
failings of the US occupation administration in
Iraq is worth multiple readings for depicting
reality from an objective, non-ideological stance.
Set in the 18-square-kilometer,
overwhelmingly male American enclave in central
Baghdad known as the Green Zone, Chandrasekaran's
book opens with a description of the colonial
trappings of the US Coalition Provisional
Authority. The CPA headquartered in ousted
dictator Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, which
was managed by Halliburton, the US defense
contracting firm reaping the spoils of war,
courtesy of neo-conservative nepotism. Hired for
hundreds of millions of US dollars to provide "living
support services" to the CPA, Halliburton set up
"the same sort of bubble that American oil
companies build for their workers in Saudi Arabia,
Nigeria and Indonesia". (p16)
Most CPA
staff members had never worked outside the US and
were hired on the basis of connections to
Republican congressmen, conservative think-tanks
and George W Bush-Dick Cheney re-election
contributors. Fenced into the sterilized safety of
the Green Zone, CPA officials referred to the rest
of Baghdad as the "Red Zone" where "bad guys might
choose to attack". (p 19) The real Baghdad with
its frightful lawlessness and privation was wished
away dreamily as another world. As war raged
viciously all around, one could "hear stories with
happy endings like the interim constitution and
the democracy project". (p 21) Denied unvarnished
sources of information about happenings, CPA
staffers ludicrously "kept abreast of developments
in Iraq by watching Fox News and reading Stars and
Stripes, which was printed in Germany". (p.25)
The CPA's predecessor, the Office of
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA),
was assembled haphazardly and overloaded with
personnel with little experience in the Middle
East and in nation-building. Many had no exposure
to conflict situations and were "clueless as to
what to do". (p 35) ORHA was plagued with
internecine squabbling between the Pentagon and
the State Department over appointments and
priorities. Knowledgeable figures were chased out
through the over-politicized interference of
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice
President Cheney. The US Army did not care to help
ORHA with logistics and security. ORHA head Joel
Garner struggled simultaneously to please the
Pentagon and not irritate the State Department.
Lacking a political transition plan for Iraq, he
was "set up to fail". (p 55)
Garner's
successor, viceroy Paul Bremer of the CPA, wanted
the United States to be as ambitious in Iraq as it
had been in post-World War II Germany and Japan. A
control freak who earned his spurs under Henry
Kissinger, Bremer gathered a coterie of
sycophantic young aides who never challenged his
grandiose schemes and edicts. His functioning
style was "don't contradict me". (p 65) Adamant
that a permanent constitution should precede
elections, Bremer brushed off Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani's demand for the reverse sequence and
stuck to his "awfully unrealistic"
handover-of-sovereignty blueprint.
Bremer's unseasoned advisers tried to
right Saddam's wrongs by favoring the
once-oppressed Shi'ites at the expense of the
once-ruling Sunnis and bungled enough to worsen
fragile sectarian relations. His move to padlock
the newspaper office of firebrand cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr was a "profound miscalculation" that
triggered a massive uprising and opened a new
front. (p 273) "Bremer's approach magnified rather
than muted the very divisions that so many Iraqis
rejected." (p 285) Nationalistic Iraqis suspected
a Lebanon-like fragmented future under Bremer's
arrogant vision. His overzealous
de-Ba'athification policy was "not open for
discussion" and had disastrous consequences. With
one scrawl of his pen, the former Iraqi army,
navy, Defense Ministry and intelligence service
were disbanded. Angry pink-slipped soldiers "are
all insurgents now". (p 77)
Bernie Kerik,
the CPA's foreign policy adviser, "didn't listen
to anything, hadn't read anything" and spent his
time giving interviews saying that "the situation
was improving". (p 86) His controversial tactics
of arming Iraqi paramilitaries to restore law and
order amplified the problems and led an American
observer to comment that "he was the wrong guy at
the wrong time". (p 87) The right persons were
never tapped for CPA to be efficient.
The
CPA economic team's obsession with crafting a
free-market economy in Iraq had little resonance
on the streets. Iraqis were wary of full foreign
ownership of domestic businesses and privatization
of the oil industry. For the public, the biggest
problem was unemployment, not rapid
non-transparent privatization that the CPA was
rooting for. On being told that international law
prohibited an occupation government from selling
assets, Thomas Foley, head of the CPA's
private-sector initiative, retorted, "I don't give
a shit about international law." (p 126)
The economic team also studied harebrained
ideas of issuing Iraqis debit cards for rations in
a country with no automated teller
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East, Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
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to provide "living
support services" to the CPA, Halliburton set up
"the same sort of bubble that American oil
companies build for their workers in Saudi Arabia,
Nigeria and Indonesia". (p16) 
