Who is Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Vintage)

by: Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 12/09/2009)

Where Are Those New Traffic Codes I Asked For?
Here's how it works. You have a degree in, let's say, English Literature, and your resume says that your entire work experience has been working on the campaign of Republican senator Schmurtz. You apply for a job working for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, and sigh in relief at passing the hardball questions asked of you like, "How do you stand on Roe vs. Wade?", and "Whom did you vote for in the last presidential election?" Finally you end up in Baghdad's green zone, and are put to work designing a new traffic code, or trying to set up a computerized stock exchange.

Maybe your name is James Haveman, a 60 year old social worker. I don't know if we have a job for you. Wait, you are a true party loyalist? How about taking over the Iraqi health care system? Currently we have a gentleman running it named Frederick Burkle, Jr. He's a physician with an MA in public health, postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and UC Berkeley. He specializes in disaster-response issues, a subject he taught at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The problem with him is we aren't sure he is a Republican loyalist. So Jim why don't you go over and take his place?

I am definitely not making this up. If this were a novel by, say, Carl Hiaasen, it would be the funniest book of the year. Tragically, this is real life. I finished this book right after reading "Fiasco", and don't know if I can take many more recountings of the disaster that is Iraq.

The folks that were sent to Iraq to build a new nation made all the wrong decisions at just the right time. They were literally trying to turn Iraq into a little USA. The new traffic codes and the new regulations for the stock exchange? The Iraqis read them through, and carefully filed them in the circular file. Another big idea was to sell of the assets of state run companies and attract private investors. Selling an occupied countrys' assets is a clear violation of International Law. And there were no investors in the whole world who were interested in these companies. The CPA eliminated all import tariffs, so Iraqis bought 500,000 cars in the first year of occupation. Of course this meant mile long lines at gas stations, and when you finally got your gas you entered total gridlock on streets that were often full of military roadblocks.

This is another fascinating book on the disaster of Iraq. It'll make you angry and cry out in frustration, but all of us need to know what is going on over there.

-- Robert Derenthal, California United States

Release Date: 09/04/2007

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