Imperial Life in the Emerald City

The Emerald City was the Green Zone: four square miles of Baghdad walled off behind blast barriers after the 2003 invasion, where the Coalition Provisional Authority governed Iraq for fourteen months from Saddam's marble palace, with pork hot dogs in the dining hall, bars, a disco, and almost no one who spoke Arabic.

Chandrasekaran, who ran the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau, builds the book from the inside out: the young Republican loyalists recruited over ideology rather than expertise, résumés screened for positions on Roe v. Wade to staff an occupation; the 24 year olds assigned to launch a stock exchange; the health system handed to an anti abortion activist; the decision, taken almost casually, to dissolve the Iraqi army and de Baathify the ministries, which put hundreds of thousands of armed, humiliated men on the street and supplied the insurgency its cadre. Around the follies he threads the people who knew better, soldiers, diplomats, Iraqi professionals, watching the window close, and the city outside the wall, where the power stayed off while the palace pool stayed filtered.

The tone is the book's weapon: no editorialising, just reporting arranged so that the absurdity convicts itself, the emerald walls doing the metaphor's work. The dining hall chapters became instantly famous: an occupation run on imported pork and Frosted Flakes, in a country whose electricity its administrators could not keep on.

Around three hundred and fifty pages.

Best for readers who want the definitive account of how the occupation of Iraq was lost in its first year, told as tragic farce from inside the bubble.