Chandrasekaran, _Imperial life in the Emerald City

Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Imperial life in the Emerald City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. ISBN 1-4000-4487-1.

Summary: A history of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), from the beginning of the Iraq war to the transfer of sovereignty (June 28, 2005). The author demonstrates that most of the American rulers did no advance planning, were not well qualified for their positions, chose not to learn much about Iraqi culture, society, or language, and were unduly influenced, in their decision-making, by an ideology of privatization and free markets.

The book is divided into two parts. “Building the bubble” traces the inept mechanics of the CPA's staff selection and the short-sighted, thrown-together construction of its policies. “Shattered dreams” then shows the natural, mostly predictable consequences of these staff choices and policies.

Chandrasekharan's conversational and anecdotal narrative style is appealing, and his accounts of the CPA's elaborate, costly experiments in nation-building would be hilarious if only they were fictional. But you can't make up characters like the American college president who is hired to be the Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, charged with the responsibility of reconstructing Iraq's devastated university system. He got the job because he had been a Republican all his life and strongly supported the war, and because Donald Rumsfield's wife was on his college's board of trustees. Although he knew almost nothing about Iraq, he didn't read any books on the subject before he got there because he didn't trust book learning and wanted to arrive with an open mind. If he were a character in a novel, the reader would snort with derision or disgust. But the reader of Chandrasekharan's book just wants to put his head in his hands and moan.