'Imperial Life in the Emerald City'

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'Imperial Life in the Emerald City'

Jan 2009

Speakers: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Shoma Chaudhury

Why Now?

Responding to the announcement that US troops were to end combat operations in his country, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki gave thanks: "Iraq today is sovereign and independent. With the execution of the troop pullout, our relations with the United States have entered a new stage between two equal, sovereign countries."

The occupation after Saddam Hussein's overthrow has not been easy. In all, 1.5million Americans served in Iraq, despite the Pentagon's 2003 promise to George W Bush that the war would be short. Many of the worst mistakes of the reconstruction took place under the aegis of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which governed Iraq from the Green Zone in Baghdad until June 2004. These mistakes are chronicled in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a book which the New York Times said read "like something out of Catch-22".

In it, Chandrasekaran describes "a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America - a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, a movie theater that screened shoot-’em-up films, an all-you-could-eat buffet piled high with pork..."

The book describes a host of travesties: "the case of the twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad’s stock exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department employee forced to bribe Americans to enlist their help in preventing Iraqi weapons scientists from defecting to Iran."

Summary

Rajiv Chadrasekar reads from his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City (2006), which chronicles the American occupation of the Green Zone in Bagdhad. His short reading touches on the contrast between the comfortable life inside the American bases and the chaotic nature of the 'post-apocolyptic landscape' surrounding the base, and the lives of the local population.

Chadrasekar also talks to Shoma Chaudhury about his experience of being a journalist in Iraq. He contrasts the optimism of the first year of the war and occupation with the way opinion started to turn as the public, and even the military, became disillusioned with the lack of change, and the continued resistance, in Iraq.

Finally, Chandrasekar answers questions from the floor, discussing the likely future of American foreign policy, the financial implications of the war, the likely interconnecting fates of the Sunnis, the Shias, and the Kurds, and how journalists' perceptions of the war changed through the early years of the occupation.

This video was kindly provided by The DSC Jaipur Literature Festival