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

Front Cover
Vintage Books, 2010 - History - 365 pages
The fullest, most intimate account of life in the Green Zone, the sheltered bubble where idealistic Americans planned the occupation while Iraq fell apart.

The Green Zone, Baghdad, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, 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 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.
 

Contents

Map of the Green Zone xi
4
Youre in Charge
45
The Green Zone Scene II
63
The Green Zone Scene III
92
The Green Zone Scene IV
113
We Need to Rethink This 1 15
137
The Green Zone Scene VI
167
Let This Be Over 195
194
The Green Zone Scene IX
249
The Green Zone Scene X
263
The Green Zone Scene XI
282
The Green Zone Scene X11
292
The Green Zone Scene XIII
315
Epilogue
331
Acknowledgments
339
Index
349

The Green Zone Scene VII
207
The Green Zone Scene V111 135
235

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About the author (2010)

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing editor of "The Washington Post" and currently heads the Post's continuous news department, which provides breaking news stories to the paper's Web site, washingtonpost.com. Prior to that he was bureau chief in Baghdad, before, during, and after the war. Previously he served as Cairo bureau chief and Southeast Asia correspondent, and covered the war in Afghanistan. He joined the Post in 1994. He has served as the journalist in residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington, and as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, also in Washington.

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