Chandrasekaran - Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdads Green Zone

IMPERIAL LIFE
IN THE
EMERALD CITY

INSIDE BAGHDAD'S GREEN ZONE

RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN

First published in Great Britain 2007
Copyright Rajiv Chandrasekaran

This electronic edition published 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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For my parents

CONTENTS

In the back garden of the Republican Palace, deep in the heart of the Green Zone, bronzed young men with rippling musclesand tattooed forearms plunged into a resort-size swimming pool. Others, clad in baggy trunks and wraparound sunglasses, laysprawled on chaise lounges in the shadows of towering palms, munching Doritos and sipping iced tea. Off to the side, men inkhakis and women in sundresses relaxed under a wooden gazebo. Some read pulp novels, some noshed from the all-you-can-eatbuffet. A boom box thumped with hip-hop music. Now and then, a dozen lanky Iraqi men in identical blue shirts and trouserswalked by on their way to sweep the deck, prune the shrubbery, or water the plants. They moved in single file behind a burly,mustachioed American foreman. From a distance, they looked like a chain gang.

The pool was an oasis of calm in the Green Zone, the seven-square-mile American enclave in central Baghdad. The only disruption was the occasional whoomp-whoomp of a low-flying Black Hawk helicopter, a red cross painted on its drab olive underbelly, ferrying casualties to the hospital down the street. A few loungers glanced up at the chopper, but most were unfazed. It was the trilling of a mobile phone that commanded attention. The American firm that had set up the network didnt provide voice mailanswering a call was the only way to find out what the boss wanted or where the party was later that night.

The conversations within earshot focused on plans for vacations at the Dead Sea, the previous nights drinking session, andthe sole woman brave enough to sunbathe by the pool amid several dozen sex-starved men. One man proclaimed to his buddiesthat after a few months in the overwhelmingly male Green Zone, every woman became a perfect ten.

It was June 2004, and the end of American rule in Iraq was less than a month away. Inside the marble-walled palace, the headquartersof the occupation administration, a few bureaucrats remained cloistered in their air-conditioned offices, toiling for eighteenhours a day to check off one more item on the grand to-do list before they flew home. One woman I knew, a mother of four fromDelaware, was scrambling to enlist Iraqis to reopen Baghdads stock exchange. A lawyer who had once clerked for Supreme Courtchief justice William Rehnquist was poring over a draft edict requiring Iraqi political parties to engage in American-stylefinancial disclosure. A blond Californian in his early twenties was creating PowerPoint presentations to send back to Washingtonshowing that the Americans were making progress, that life in Iraq was improving by the day.

These were the exceptions. Most people in the palace had simply given up, seeking instead the solace and fin de sicle merrimentof the pool. As the sun set, they repaired to the Sheherazade Bar in the al-Rasheed Hotel, where they drank Turkish beer,Lebanese wine, and third-rate blended Scotch. They shopped for watches, lighters, and old Iraqi banknotes that bore the visageof Saddam Hussein. They bought T-shirts that quipped whos your baghdaddy? They ate pizza at the Green Zone Caf and KungPao chicken at the two Chinese restaurants near the palace. At the gymnasium, they worked out under a poster of the WorldTrade Center towers. They called friends in America for free on their government-issued mobile phones. They threw raucousfarewell parties and had one last fling. They sent e-mails to line up jobs with President George W. Bushs reelection campaignwhen they returned to America. When they grew tired, they retreated to their rooms to watch pirated DVDstwo for a dollarhawked by enterprising young Iraqis.

It was in the palace garden where I met with John Agresto for the first time. He had arrived in Baghdad nine months earlierto undertake the daunting task of rehabilitating Iraqs university systemmore than 375,000 students enrolled at twenty-twocampuses, almost all of which had been decimated in the looting that followed the overthrow of Saddam Husseins government.Agresto had no background in post-conflict reconstruction and no experience in the Middle East. The institution he ran, St.Johns College in Santa Fe, had fewer than five hundred students. But Agresto was connected: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeldswife had been on the St. Johns board and Vice President Dick Cheneys wife had worked with him at the National Endowmentfor the Humanities.

When we met, he was fifty-eight years old. A stocky man with thinning silver hair, a gray-flecked mustache, and a prominentnose, he liked to compare his appearance to that of Groucho Marx.

Puffing on his pipe under the shade of a broad palm there was no smoking indoors in the Green ZoneAgresto said that he hadlanded in Iraq with an abundance of optimism. I saw the images of people cheering as Saddam Husseins statue was pulled down,he said. I saw people hitting pictures of him with their shoes.

But the Iraq he encountered was far different from what he had expected. His visits to the universities he was trying to rebuildand with the faculties he wanted to invigorate became more and more dangerousand infrequent. He told me his Iraqi staff hadbeen threatened by insurgents. His evenings were disrupted by mortar attacks on the Green Zone. His plans to repair hundredsof campus buildings had been scuttled by the White House. He had concluded that Iraqs universities needed more than $1 billionto become viable centers of learning, but he had received only $8 million in reconstruction funds. American colleges and universitieshad rebuffed his entreaties for assistance. He had asked for 130,000 classroom desks from the U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment. He got 8,000.

His agitation grew as he spoke. Then he fell silent, staring at the pool and puffing away. After a moment, he turned to me,his face grave, and said, Im a neoconservative whos been mugged by reality.