first impression of Imperial Life in the Emerald City

The Bastard of Istanbul was not there, so i checked out Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City instead. I'm far from finished with the book, but every page has made me cringe with just how many mistakes were made in planning and executing rebuilding Iraq after the removal of Saddam. There are a few heroes, but only tragic heroes, Cassandras who warned of the consequences of the lack of foresight and gross mismanagement, or selfless martyrs who undertake Sisyphean tasks to be undermined by their superiors.

It's a bitterly funny book though. I've burst out laughing several times, even though i feel kinda dirty afterwards. It would be the darkest of satires if it was not actually documenting real events.

One of the less monstrous fuck-ups (meaning that living people were not directly hurt by the mistakes) that amused me was this one regarding the oversight in securing several high priority sites during the fall of Baghdad:

Even as the impact of the looting was becoming clear, ORHA could not prod the military into action. When Barbara Bodine, a veteran diplomat and Arabic speaker who was to become the interim mayor of Baghdad, got word from an Iraqi contact that looters were perilously close to breaking into a vault under the Central Bank that housed a priceless collection of Assyrian gold, she fired off an e-mail to the U.S. Central Command. The exchange, as she and a State Department official in Washington who was copied on the messages remember it, went something like this:

BODINE: The Assyrian vault under the Central Bank is in immediate danger of being looted. We need to get on this.
CENTCOM: What's in the Assyrian vault?
BODINE (thinking of the "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?" line) : Assyrian treasure.
CENTCOM: What's an Assyrian treasure?
BODINE: Go read the early chapters of your Bible. It's old stuff. It's really really valuable. We need to save it.
CENTCOM: Okay. We'll see what we can do.

Well, it amused me anyway. To ORHA's credit, the Central Bank was at the top of its list of sites to be secured and protected. Unfortunately, ORHA was neutered by Rumsfeld excising any personnel that he regarded as a threat from the State Department, replacing them with less qualified political hacks, and then not providing them with the material support that they needed to do the job.

The further i get in, the more cringes i get rather than laughs. I knew of many of the mistakes from articles that i've read the past few years, but to have them woven together into a larger tapestry, it is still jaw-dropping.

More later, i hope....