IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Bloomsbury £12.99

In just 12 months in 2003-04, a small group of neo-con Americans attempted to implant a pro-western, capitalist democracy in the shattered ruins of Saddam’s Iraq. Nothing in modern colonial history was to be so hallucinatory in its madness. The operation was conducted from a seven-square-mile Green Zone fortress based on Saddam’s palace compound in downtown Baghdad. Kafka’s castle was a friendly neighbourhood drop-in centre in comparison.

Visiting the zone at the time involved a hair-raising drive through Baghdad’s chaotic streets, filled with bombed and looted buildings and raw sewage, unpoliced and with sinister, armed youths loitering in alleys. Once through its enormous gates, the visitor was in an eerie bubble, part American religious camp, part Mash unit. I once noticed two men acting suspiciously under a huge SUV in the car park and alerted the guards. They leapt forward, guns drawn and challenged the men. It turned out they were clamping the vehicle for being improperly parked. While all Iraq was screaming for security, the defence contractor Halliburton was flying in wheel clampers to check on parking in the Green Zone.

A number of accounts have now emerged of how the Pentagon was so unprepared for nation-building in Iraq. Most, such as Bob Woodward’s recent State of Denial, are written “top down” from Washington. Chandrasekaran, a Washington Post reporter at the time, watched the policy bottom-up from within and beyond the Green Zone. The result is jaw-dropping.

To the Pentagon, anything or anyone with knowledge of Iraq was considered polluted thereby. A new “social conservative” state was to be built, literally from a bombed and looted ground zero, exclusively by Bush loyalists and staffers from right-wing think tanks, irrespective of their inexperience. The Republican Palace, nerve centre at the heart of the fortress, was run by a pimply 22-year-old Halliburton employee named Cole. Everything — food, catering staff, hamburgers, pizzas, water, even the weekly laundry — was ferried in from Kuwait at vast expense (and profit). No contracts were let to Iraqis.

Staff of the so-called Coalition Provisional Authority lived like refugees in containers or cots laid out in Saddam’s majestic ballrooms. There was no privacy and often no air conditioning. Since nobody was allowed to leave the zone except in armoured convoy, social life was minimal. Such was the male surplus that one outgoing pilot told his passengers: "Ladies and gentlemen, we're exiting Iraqi airspace. Ladies, you are no longer beautiful."

While the first civilian administrator of Iraq, Jay Garner, could do little beyond watch Baghdad burn, the arrival of Paul Bremer as “viceroy” in June 2003 initiated the full neo-con programme, a bone-shaking economic fundamentalism. He abolished import controls and stood back while Saddam’s ramshackle but semi-operational manufacturing sector simply collapsed. Iraq was instantly flooded with secondhand cars with no petrol to power them.

Bremer not only disbanded the army and police, supposedly to create new ones, but ordered the ministry of industry’s 48 parastatal businesses to be privatised. This was disastrous, since it meant tens of thousands of people, formerly supported by the state, being laid off with no hope of anyone buying their factory. The first manager to mention the subject to his staff was instantly shot dead. Meanwhile, power supplies were never restored to the levels that even Saddam achieved. People in the Green Zone could issue daily orders and send armoured cars loaded with dollars. But because nobody was guarding anything, everything was stolen. An official sent to reopen the central bank found it a smoking hole in the ground. A 24-year-old sent to reopen the Baghdad stock exchange fled back to the Green Zone and started ordering expensive computers (which any broker still in business neither needed nor used).

Bremer sacked all senior officials with Ba’ath party connections. This decapitated what remained of a state apparatus and drove more than a million of the best-qualified civil servants, teachers, doctors and security chiefs into unemployment, penury and either insurgency or exile. Pleas from saner heads within the Green Zone to stop the policy were ignored. Washington was running Iraq its way. Ministries, most of them bombed or looted shells, were replaced by card tables in the Green Zone presided over by youngsters with not a clue what to do. They would hurl money at any contractor (or charlatan) who promised to deliver something that meant good news to Washington. On one estimate a staggering $8 billion of imported American money remains unaccounted for. A defence-ministry official is reputed to have driven to Amman with $800m, joining most of Iraq’s middle class, encamped and waiting for the aftermath of the American departure.

Some of the stories are poignant. A New Mexican academic linked to the American Enterprise Foundation flew in to “refound” Iraq’s universities. Millions were awarded to consultants in the US to plan such things as “a modernised archeology curriculum” while students still had no books, no chairs, no classrooms and precious few teachers, since most had been Ba’ath members. Soon, Shi’ite gangs were terrorising the campuses, forcing girls to cover themselves and murdering dissident teachers.

Inside the Green Zone, staffers drew up a new Iraqi traffic code, downloaded from the State of Maryland website. Unfortunately, there were no policemen to enforce it. A new media regime was styled on that of Fox News. Iraqis promptly turned to Al-Jazeera. The new health regime was meant to be the best in the Arab world, yet nobody could get drugs to hospitals, where doctors were being kidnapped (and murdered) almost daily.

I met an Iraqi political scientist at the time who professed herself baffled by secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s strategy. The first rule of a coup, she said, is secure essential buildings, order all soldiers and police to report, armed, to barracks, raise their pay, and shoot looters on sight. Why was none of this done? When Bremer departed in June 2004, supposedly handing power to an Iraqi transitional government, Chandrasekaran asked a local friend what had gone wrong. “The biggest mistake of the occupation,” came the reply, “was the occupation.”

The grimmest thing about this book is that the period it covers, 2003-04, was when some hope was still in the air. America did have a small chance of bringing a new order to what had once been a prosperous country. Chandrasekaran could at that time wander through Baghdad, visit the bookshop street in the old quarter and chat to the old men in the teashops. Last month, that charming street and the surrounding markets were destroyed by a huge bomb. The books are gone and the booksellers are mostly dead.

Iraqis now quote Confucius: better a lifetime of dictatorship than 24 hours of anarchy. They have now had four years of anarchy. It has been an epic mistake.

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