Imperial Life in the Emerald City

[Brainaddict]

Anyone else read this book about the Baghdad green zone administration? by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. I've read the first fifty pages or so and it's a cracking read. He has this knack for describing things in a completely po-faced way that comes across like a satirical novel or something.

It's a brilliant object lesson in how *not* to do post-conflict reconstruction, while exposing the ideological drives behind what appeared to be incompetence.

I highly recommend it even though I haven't finished it yet.

 

[rennie]

It's a very very good book. Read it and weep...

 

[Belushi]

Read it a few months ago, a brilliant account of the hubris and sheer fuckwittery that caused the occupation to be such a disaster.

 

[Brainaddict]

It is a book to make you weep indeed, but I think it's great that he manages to bring out the (dark) humour of it so well. I just read the bit where Jay Garner's pathetically ill-supported administration gets to Baghdad and set up camp (literally) in the palace where they don't have water or power or enough soldiers to guard them - and they hear a rumour that one of Uday's tigers is loose in the grounds, so when the army reservist responsible for securing the building goes anywhere at night he walks around with a torch in one hand and a gun in the other, fearing an encounter with the tiger...