thiagoraisel

The short take: bad organizational structure and writing that is really just mediocre journalistic prose. Although Chandrasekaran begins with a narrative "I," he never really identifies himself, and then launches into details about things like relationships between State department members and Pentagon members back in Washington, making one wonder where the information is coming from. There is little direct quotation, and his presentation and interpretation of events are so mixed that it's difficult to feel that it's an unbiased account. The author hence fails to be convincing in his arguments for the exact reasons and mechanisms by which the U.S. (or more specifically, the Coalition Provisional Authority) failed in Iraq. His explanation of sources given in the notes at the book's end is somewhat redeeming, but not necessarily helpful at the end of the book. Sadly, what appears to be his other goal - to provide an engaging story about the war in Iraq and paint a portrait of life inside the Green Zone - only half succeeds for some of the same reasons. There is no clear voice: sometimes you hear directly from the author, but this often slips into third-person narration, sometimes focused on a CPA employee, sometimes on the state of events in Iraq overall, but he never stays long on one given theme. These vignettes tend to feel stilted, disjointed and formulaic. His attempt to build characters out of key CPA personnel basically includes introducing each person with the same details: what they were doing before Iraq; basic physical description, including particular attention on dress and hair style; current job in the CPA; 2-3 key personality traits; if they're qualified for the job and good, reason they are soon fired; if they aren't qualified, explanation of the GOP connection that got them the job and is why they're keeping it and bungling things up in Iraq. The book is obviously supposed to outrage you at our handling of things in the early part of our presence in Iraq. That it manages fairly well: there's no missing the fact that loyalty to Bush was the main standard by which people were chosen for CPA projects, and that for the most part, this landed us with a bunch of incompetent, unknowledgable fools who were supposed to "build democracy" in the country whose infrastructure we had just destroyed in our "shock and awe" campaign. Also fairly obvious throughout the book is that the definition of "democracy" most of these people are working with looks suspiciously like the definition of "free market capitalism." The money that gets poured into privatization efforts and computerizing the Baghdad Stock Exchange, rather than into rebuilding power plants, water purification plants, or education and improved public safety, is astounding. The lack of questioning of this conflation is also amazing. Why should we think that unlimited opportunities for businessmen to make money will bring peace to a land and teach people how to govern themselves? There's an obvious lesson that we need to really examine what we mean by "democratic values" at home before we attempt to force them upon others. The other point that I find most interesting, which comes up only briefly, is that the ethnic and religious divisions fueling Iraq's civil war were largely created by us Americans. The distinctions between Kurd, Sunni, and Shiite existed, but much less so before the American occupation. (Claiming certain affiliations could be pretty dangerous under Saddam's government.) In our attempt at "fairness," however, we hardened these categories to set up governing structures equally divided among these different groups, forcing stronger affiliations, and essentially laying the groundwork for civil war. While Chandrasekaran doesn't lay this out, it lines up well with what has happened in other colonized states like Rwanda (see Mahmood Mamdani's book on this). So, all told, it was an informative book, though otherwise disappointing.

2020-02-01 03:11