Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone is the funniest book I've read in a long while. It's almost a laugh a page, and it reads like Wodehouse: well-to-do idiots live in posh environments, backstab and plot, and wind up in outlandish situations. Sadly, there is no Jeeves-to-the-rescue in Imperial City - there's only tens of thousands of dead people everywhere.
Imperial City is the story of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that was set up to run Iraq after one of those mad western countries - name escapes me - invaded it in 2003. The book pretty much obliterated everything I thought I knew about Iraq. Honestly, I stopped reading the news accounts and listening to the BBC dispatches less than a year after the invasion. I couldn't stand the reporting, the stupidity of it all, the news that wasn't news.
I learned that Jay Garner was an alright guy for a leader completely out of his league; he knew shit when he saw shit and wasn't afraid to buck when necessary. Too bad he didn't think it necessary more often.
Paul "Jerry" Bremer is possibly the biggest fool unearthed and put into a position of undeserved power since Bud Selig. He had the design and the nerve and the authority to order and decree life and liberty in country, and he fucked it in alarming fashion.
I like the book because it didn't focus too much on the shitheels the New Yorker liked to write about, the neo-cons and the DOD numbskulls, because they weren't going to tell you the truth anyhow. Rajiv C did a fine job of sourcing low, mid and senior level accounts for his book, and the stories they tell - and there were a lot of people admitting fuckups - ring true.
Lurking behind the wall of the green zone and the book itself is the mystery man al-Sistani, who for better or worse brought the CPA to its knees. I need to read a book about that strange old cat; hopefully Rajiv can write one.
5 comments:
hey, I made a special trip to get money and then never paid you for dinner- I suck, but you're now in the black 6 or 7 drinks
no prob; and thank Nic for me - 195 pages into Imperial Life - it's so hilarious and good. why isn't bremer in shackles?
yea, it's a great book, but "funny" is pushing it. Bremer's arrogance is so repulsive you just want to reach into the text and rip his liver out. The stories tell themselves, and the author doesn't have any literary ambitions. He also doesn't appear to be a partisan hack just looking to bury the knife. The Bushies did that all by themselves.
It's an amazing book in the true meaning of that word. You can't believe the shit that goes on. For some reason, Bremer's boots are the single detail (aside from the deaths) that stand out the most as the most egregious bullshit of all. What fucking cunts
he wore his boots to the one year reunion - what a dipshit.
"Ladies and gentlemen...we got him!"
i think it will be read as a comedy 50 years from now. it's just too much to think it really went down as such 5 years ago, and bremer was a real dude and not a closet perv philip roth creation.
when my cousin came back from Iraq right after the collapse of Saddam's govt, I couldn't believe how wild west so much of it sounded. Supplies couldn't reach troops, so a bunch of Marines he knew just broke into an Iraqi army garage and stole their trucks. Hot wired them. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. Sadly now it seems quite plausible. Pat also told me howthe Iraqi people seemed disinterested in the opportunity for elections or changing their country.
I think I would find it very hard to read this book. Like also probably McClellan's book, I would only be able to enjoy it if I knew there was going to be CONSEQUENCES for these shithead's behavior. As we enter the last months of the worst administration in US history, is anyone going to pay for the last 8 years is as important to me as who are next president is.
But I'll probably read both books.
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