Rajiv Chandrasekaran discusses Imperial Life in the Emerald City.
The year is 2003, and in the Green Zone of Baghdad, a walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, L. Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen primarily for their political affiliations and views on issues such as abortion, the CPA spent the crucial
first year of the occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate crises of a postwar nation.
In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate and remarkably
dispassionate portrait of life inside this Oz-like place, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside.
This is a quietly devastating portrait of imperial folly, and an essential book for anyone who wants to understand those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq- World Affairs Council Connecticut