Suggested Reading

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book, Imperial Life In The Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone has recently come out, and he’s been making the rounds. Chandrasekaran, now an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, tells the story of the first year in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, when the reconstruction of Iraq was overseen by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) led by L. Paul Bremer III. Chandrasekaran witnessed the events as the Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief. The suggestion is not to buy the book itself (although that is an option), but to check out some free avenues to review what’s in it – even an overview is a frightening look at a real travesty.

In an adaptation of the book written by Chandrasekaran for the Post, one can get a taste of the corrupt and nepotistic hiring practices of the White House’s liasion to the Pentagon, where an applicant may be asked his or her vote for President in 2000, or views on abortion, even if the job was to head the reopening of the Baghdad Stock Exchange (which was handed to a 24-year-old Bush loyalist with no background in finance). Side note: Yes, Jim O’Beirne is married to that Kate O’Beirne – some things are no surprise.

The review in the New York Times Book Review by Michael Goldfarb will only be free until next Saturday or Sunday. It contains a couple more nuggets of bureaucratic idiocy and corruption.

For those who would like a break from the reading, see Chandrasekaran’s interview (Part 1 and Part 2) on The Daily Show.

All this material is both disturbing and disheartening, almost to the point of being funny. It is one thing to hear about the utter lack of preparation for Iraq's reconstruction, or, say, how a blockheaded Defense Secretary could not adjust to his enemy. But Chandrasekaran’s book brings into even better view that, on some basic level, the Bush Administration's hubris causes them to really think that anyone who likes them, no matter how unqualified, is better for any job than someone they're not sure about. It the worst kind of identification politics leaking into the bureaucratic sphere.

Blog note: For the holiday, the posts could be light until after the New Year.