Life inside the bubble
Review by Peter Arkell
The scene is a press briefing by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of Iraq (the government of the occupation) in Baghdad’s Green Zone, in 2004.
Question (in Arabic from an Iraqi journalist): General Kimmitt, the sound of American helicopters, which fly so low to the ground, is terrifying young children, especially at night. Why do you insist on flying so low and scaring the Iraqi people?
Gen Kimmitt: What we would tell the children of Iraq is that the noise they hear is the sound of freedom...
This extract, from Rajiv Chandrasekaran`s book about life inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, the American bubble of a few square kilometres around Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace on the edge of the Tigris River, is one of many absurd stories that combine to make up a kind of mosaic of madness that is the American occupation of Iraq.
The author, a journalist for the Washington Post at the time, describes, without emotion or over-statement, the events and processes set in motion by the operatives inside this little American oasis of swimming pools, bars, gyms, Chinese restaurants, hamburger joints, and American limousines – a kind of gated community, surrounded by a 17-ft high anti-blast wall, topped with coils of razor wire, all built and run by (who else) Halliburton.
The humour, balanced by an ever-present sense of tragedy, derives from the incongruous juxtaposition of this imperialist enclave where the invaders live, cheek by jowl, with a rather different kind of world. That is the remaining 438,300 square kilometres of Iraq itself, its infrastructure shattered by the American bombing and a population angry at the deteriorating standard of life under the occupation, and hostile to the real, though hidden, plans of the US and Britain.
And so the drama plays out. Inside the “bubble” the Americans dream up schemes for imposing democracy, a new constitution or a new electricity-generating system, which all come to nothing in the real world outside. Nearly all the central characters of the occupying forces are political appointees who naively set about doing their bit to create a capitalist utopia. Many of them know nothing about Iraq and have never even bothered to read a book about the country.
Chandrasekaran traces the careers of each senior officials he meets, and invariably they qualified for the job only because they had demonstrated a loyalty to the Republican Party and were considered safe by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfold and the Pentagon. Those that did have knowledge of Iraq, mostly those sent over by the State Department, and who tried to warn the viceroy, Lewis Paul “Jerry” Bremer III against his follies, such as his decision to disband the army or purge all Baathists of their jobs, were sidelined and ignored.
Many of these ideologues working with Bremer plainly thought that it was an advantage to re-build the country from a position of absolute destruction, because that guaranteed a “clean start” in the battle to create a new university system, a new stock exchange, new traffic regulations and even a new democracy in the image of the USA.
The book, which has echoes of Catch 22, Joseph Heller’s satire about World War II, is a revealing ground-level account, of the fiasco of the neo-conservative fundamentalist vision of the world, which is really nothing more than the political cover for a world in which American corporations reign supreme.
The book concludes with a description of a CPA reunion in Washington, in June 2005 a year of so after the handover of sovereignty. Bush had recorded a video for the event. “Our mission in Iraq is clear”, he said, “We’re hunting down the terrorists. We’re helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally on the war on terror. We’re advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren”.
“He conceded no errors”, writes Chandrasekaran.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City - Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Bloomsbury. £8.99 paperback.
