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Edited on Thu Dec-28-06 06:34 PM by Plaid Adder
Before the holidays I saw Rajiv Chandrasekaran on The Daily Show promoting his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone. Based on the author's 8-minute conversation with Jon Stewart, I decided I had to have it. My partner's sister gave it to me for Christmas, and I have just finished reading it.
I urge any of you who a) read and b) want to know exactly why and how Iraq became the mess it currently is following our invasion to get a hold of this book. Though it is 300 pages long and jam-packed with detail, it reads like a novel. Like a harrowing, bleak, tragic novel in which sympathetic underdogs struggle to no avail against the doom foreordained for them by the immutable and, frankly, insane powers that be.
While all the discussion about "what to do about Iraq" (as if we can, at this point, do anything 'about' it any more) focuses on the military, Emerald City focuses on the civilians who were put in charge of rebuilding Iraq following the invasion. Chandrasekaran's book provides devastating evidence in support of a theory you don't hear much about in the corridors of power, but which will be instantly persuasive to anyone familiar with the operations of the Bush administration here at home: that the 'rebuilding' effort was doomed from the start by the ignorance, arrogance, selfishness, and ideological blindness of the people who were in charge of the project. From the initial chapters, which describe the various ways in which Rumsfeld and Cheney sabotaged Jay Garner to the closing description of L. Paul Bremer and his lackeys partying at a 2005 reunion and congratulating themselves and each other for the wonderful job they did while Iraq explodes in sectarian violence, the book is one long indictment of the neocons. Step by step, Chandrasekaran walks the reader through all the rebuilding projects that were scuttled, abandoned, sabotaged, or fucked up beyond all repair by the special combination of behaviors that we have come to know and love from our own domestic encounters with the neocons' style of governance: adhering inflexibly to rigid and preconceived "conservative" principles, rejecting input from the "reality-based community," refusing to accept the help or utilize the expertise of anyone deemed politically "suspect," assuming that they are always right regardless of mounting evidence to the contrary, and the identifying loyalty to Bush and his circle as the primary and in many cases indeed the only job qualification required.
The general outline of this story was apparent to anyone who was paying attention to the news during the early years of the war. What gives Emerald City its horrifying fascination is the way Chandrasekaran uses his two years of reporting, research, and interviews to recreate with sickening immediacy and astonishing intimacy the disaster that we have been forced to witness from afar and through a glass darkly. For instance, we have long been outraged by our sense that the Bush administration launched the invasion without a plan for dealing with the aftermath--beyond the now-infamous 'strategy' of miraculously being welcomed by the Iraqis bearing not only flowers but a complete blueprint for a new democratic government that had unanimous popular support. Well, Chandrasekaran's early chapters argue that, in fact, it wasn't so much that they didn't think to come up with a plan: in fact, they deliberately prevented Jay Garner, the guy Douglas Feith had tapped to be in charge of the postinvasion phase, from coming up with one. Why? Because, according to Chandrasekaran, they were afraid that if Garner was allowed to come up with a real plan, it might interfere with Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feith et al.'s plan, which was basically to turn the joint over to Achmed Chalabi as soon as possible. In partciular, they were very worried that he might talk to people at the State Department who knew something about Iraq--and who consequently felt that the administration's plans for Iraq were a load of horsehockey.
So, they didn't tell Garner that there was a two-year study called the Future of Iraq Project being run by the State Department that had already produced 2500 pages' worth of policy recommendations about what to do during the postwar phase of a "post-Saddam Iraq." When Garner, more or less by chance, met the guy who was in charge of the project, he hired him. A week later, Rumsfeld (acting, Garner says he was later told, on orders from Cheney), demanded that Garner fire him, thus cutting off Garner's access to the project's reports (which of course were classified). Two days before Garner's team was due to leave for Kuwait in preparation for the invasion, Rumsfeld tried to force him to replace a number of key people because they were from the State Department. Meanwhile, the Office of Special Plans--the Bush cabal in charge of doing all the real planning--wouldn't, of course, let Garner see any of their documents, because he wasn't one of the anointed.
Despite the difficulties, Garner's team--the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA--did formulate a plan, which included a list of sites to be secured and protected by American troops during and immediately after the invasion of Baghdad. Here's Chandrasekaran's description of what happened with that:
Two weeks <before the looting began>, the ORHA ministers had worked up a list of sites in Baghdad that needed security. Atop the list was the Central Bank. Then came the National Museum. The Oil Ministry was at the bottom. Weeks later, ORHA personnel discovered that the military had failed to transmit the list to ground commanders in Baghdad.
Which explains, perhaps, why the only building that the soldiers did protect from looting was the Ministry of Oil.
When I read the chapter on Garner (it's titled "A Deer in the Headlights") I thought it was going to be the most outrageous portrait of malice, incompetence, and tragically unfounded hubris run homicidally amok that the book would offer. I was wrong. Very wrong.
Much of the book is devoted to a chapter by chapter exploration of the various projects of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the civilian-run but Pentagon-controlled organization set up to manage the 'rebuilding' of Iraq. Ruled with an iron fist by L. Paul Bremer III, the guy sent over to replace Garner after he inevitably failed to pacify Iraq, the CPA was packed with what Chandrasekaran refers to as "political hacks"--people who were sent to Iraq not because they had any prayer of knowing what they were doing but because they were politically connected and ideologically pure. Chandrasekaran's descriptions of life inside the Green Zone--the walled-off, fortified, increasingly isolated "emerald city" where most of the CPA personnel spent just about 100% of their time in Iraq--are evocative, and will no doubt be the draw that pulls a lot of readers through this description of what is essentially a catastrophic and gigantically flawed attempt at civil and social engineering. Halliburton et al. strove to replicate America--specifically, America "south of the Mason-Dixon line"--as completely as possible for the denizens of the Green Zone, from the food in the cafeteria (plenty of pork products, much of it served by Muslims from India and Pakistan who hated having to handle it) to the fleets of identical Suburbans in which the CPA bigwigs tooled around. The complete disconnect between life inside the Green Zone and life outside it is a heightened, bloodstained, more surreal version of the disconnect we've seen at home between the Bush administration's fantasy world and the one the rest of us are living in, and it is infuriating to watch preventable mistakes made again and again by people who either have never thought to inform themselves about life beyond the walls or actively refuse to do so. More than anything, it's the refusal to consider the prospect that they don't already know everything--intellectually, ideologically, and experientially--that dooms Bremer and his cadre from the outset. Unwilling to question their own assumptions or to take advice from staffers who are willing to do so, they go right on making blunder after blunder, wasting money, time, and lives in a failed attempt to rebuild Iraq in the image of America.
But along the way, the book really teaches you a lot about the challenges posed by the 'rebuilding effort' and what it might have taken to meet them, and that's one reason why I think it's ultimately more valuable than the Woodwardian trilogy. Public discussion of Iraq has been so focused on Saddam himself that there is very little understanding here of the larger system that was in place when we invaded Iraq in 2003. Iraq before the invasion was a bloated, inefficient, Soviet-style socialist bureaucracy, complete with the kind of official corruption peculiar to that particular system. Because everyone on the CPA assumed that that kind of system was an unmitigated evil and that the birth of free-market capitalism from its ashes was a process a thousand times more natural than childbirth and requiring far less intervention, the CPA was unable to follow through on their dream of privatization. It did not occur to them, for instance, that firing redundant personnel from government-run industries in order to make them more profitable might spark protests, riots, and deadly reprisals in a country where for two generations there had been guaranteed employment for large sections of the population. Not only did they get the people issues wrong, they even got the economic issues wrong. Chandrasekan provides a fascinating explanation of how the CPA's attempt to rehabilitate the complex of government-owned Iraqi industries actually crippled industries that might have become viable as private concerns while artificially sustaining ones that were already doomed. Perhaps the most concrete example of the CPA's collective failure to understand the reality they were attempting to transform was the attempt to eliminate the government-subsidized monthly food ration. To avoid sparking food riots when the ration was discontinued, the CPA decided to replace the actual food with an equivalent cash stipend, which would inject free market magic by giving the Iraqis the opportunity to spend the money on whatever they wanted. When it was made clear to them that handing out sums of cash under these conditions was impractical, the next idea was to issue Iraqis with debit cards. This in a country with no ATM machines, no credit card readers in most shops, and rolling blackouts because the CPA couldn't get Washington to authorize as much money as it would have taken to rebuild Iraq's power system.
Searching through this banquet of outrage for one example that would really crystallize the fundamental dysfunction that made the 'rebuilding' effort doomed from before the beginning, I came up with this description of how the CPA approached rebuilding Iraq's health care system:
Once the Americans arrived, the job of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system fell to Frederick M. Burkle, jr., a physicial with a master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle was a naval reserve officer with two Bronze Stars and a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues. During the first Gulf War, he provided medical aid to Kurds in northern Iraq. A USAID colleague called him the "single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States Government."
A week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed that he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID told him that the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burlke had a wall of degrees, but he didn't have a picture of himself with the President.
Burkle's job was handed to James K. Haveman, Jr., a sixty-year-old social worker who was largely unknown among international health experts. He had no medical degree, but he had connections. He had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Wolfowitz. Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity. Prior to his stint in government, Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.
And that works out about as well as you'd expect it to. Instead of trying to rehabilitate and refurnish the hospitals that are trying to cope with a constant influx of the horribly wounded without basic medical equipment or reliable electric power, Haveman decides his goal is to "refashion Iraq's socialist health-care system into one that looked more American, with co-payments and primary-care clinics." Not understanding, apparently, that the needs of a country with an ongoing guerilla war involving massive civilian casualties are different from the needs of, say, a large for-profit hospital system trying to cut down on Medicare and Medicaid costs, Haveman obsessed over rewriting the "formulary"--the list of prescription drugs that Iraq's government-owned pharmaceutical firm was supposed to provide to Iraqi hospitals--to make it more restrictive (and to include more drugs produced by American pharmaceutical companies). Ultimately Haveman hands over control of the ministry to the Iraqis, preparatory to the final transfer of sovereignty, without having been able to privatize the system and without even having restored it to its pre-invasion state.
That story is repeated over and over in every sector. Whether they're trying to create an Iraqi media network or retrain the Iraqi police force, it's the same fuck up for the same reasons as the same pattern repeats itself. Qualified people are rejected for top spots in favor of self-confident, autocratic, politically-connected idiots who don't know what they're doing and won't listen to people who do. Said politically-connected idiots propose sweeping, radical, shiny new policies which will use a lot of fancy technology and private capital to build a bigger, better, American-style version of whatever it is they're in charge of. These changes are never ultimately implemented, and whatever it was is left worse than when they began. The stories of the few top people who did grasp what was happening and try to make a difference are that much more painful because it's so clear that they had so little power to impact the final outcome, despite their often quite heroic efforts to do their jobs right with what little they were given.
I could go on--but my basic point is: you need to read this book. Because it's the most insightful, comperehensive, well-documented, and damning explanation of how we made Iraq an unmitigated disaster; but also because it teaches us things that we all really need to know about how and why we too have been misgoverned all these years--and what the results are liable to be. I have not even conveyed a quarter of what this book has to teach us about the rot at the heart of this administration; I've just tried to focus on the aspects we all are least likely to have known anything about if this book had not been published. And because it demonstrates, in such a way as to convince all but the most blinded loyalists, that we have already lost Iraq. We had lost it, probably, by the time Bremer transferred sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government in June of 2004. And we lost it not just because we didn't bring enough boots, but because we did not bring enough brains. The Bush team sent to Iraq the same claque of self-satisfied, self-deluded, triumphalist morons who have been lording it over us here at home. It should not surprise anyone that what they established was not a free, stable, democratic Iraq but the mother of all gated communities--a fortified safe haven for themselves, a kindly womb in which they and their fantasies could be nurtured and protected without any hostile intervention from the real world. Until, finally, the real world got bad enough, and the Green Zone was finally infiltrated. And even then, all that happened--to them--was that they had to leave. They have all, by and large, found other gated communities within which to barricade themselves as the disasters they hatched come home to roost. The Iraqis, and our troops, are stuck dealing with the aftermath. And for them, forever, there will never be any place like home.
:scared:
The Plaid Adder
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