Emerald City exposed

Journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran pulls back the curtain on the Green Zone in Baghdad to reveal the flops and failures of the Bush war team.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Read more: Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, Osama Bin Laden, Opinion, Iraq War

Sept. 14, 2006 | On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush delivered the culmination of yet another series of speeches on Iraq and the war on terror. For more than a year, he has periodically given speeches on military bases and before specially invited audiences who applauded his carefully crafted phrases, slightly altered on each occasion, as though these scenes represented widespread public support for his policies. But this Sept. 11 was different from the other anniversaries, partly because of the passage of half a decade but mostly because of what Bush has done with the years.

Bush hoped with his latest speech to reanimate his early iconic stature in the week after the terrorist attacks, when the whole country and world were unified in sympathy. Even "evil" Syria and Iran offered assistance in tracking down al-Qaida. Bush prompted us that "the wounds of that morning are still fresh." His evocation of emotion was an attempt to filter memory. We were guided to remember the trauma as the primal experience for sustaining Bush's politics. By touching the source of pain he tried to redirect it into an affirmation of every twist and turn he has taken since the fateful day.

He pivoted into a peculiar rationalization for the Iraq war that was defensive and distorted -- one that ultimately rested on an appeal to his own waning authority. "I'm often asked why we're in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat." But, of course, it was Bush and Dick Cheney and other prominent administration figures who had planted that impression in the public mind in the first place with thorough premeditation. Bush's transparent effort to erase his responsibility was topped by his self-presentation as the truth teller in the matter. Just as quickly as he acknowledged the fiction that was a principal prop in the public support of the invasion, he elided over the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the other principal prop. Bush simply avoided addressing their nonexistence. Instead, he revisited his discredited justification of Saddam's possession of WMD by restating it in the abstract without mentioning the missing WMD. They had now completely vanished. The assertion that "Saddam Hussein was a clear threat" depended not even on spectral evidence, because no evidence was introduced, only the statement of "a clear threat," based on his insistence that it was so.

Having worked himself through 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, he turned back to face Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, said Bush, "calls this fight 'the third world war' -- and he says that victory for the terrorists in Iraq will mean America's 'defeat and disgrace forever.'" Bush accepted bin Laden's challenge by accepting his terms. The conflict, Bush declared, was nothing less than "a struggle for civilization." Rather than diminish bin Laden, Bush elevated him. In so doing, he provided the incitement necessary to inflame the imagination of jihadists. Rather than explain to the American people that the ragtag terrorists are a real but not existential threat, that they should not be misconstrued as the central problem in our foreign policy, and that their presence can be coped with through confidence, fortitude and intelligence, Bush again mounted on a crusade, serving their purposes.

In the end, Bush's speech, the product of his finest speechwriters, was as unreflective and uninformed as his expressed understanding of Albert Camus' "The Stranger." Bush behaves as though the world is infinitely malleable and can be made over again at his command. He waves aside the consequences of his own policies and imagines them as he wishes. He summons past conflicts -- World War II, the Cold War -- as though referring to them invests him with the happy ending: "victory." He acts like a man who can speak now of "Iraq" and transform it by the adamant level of his rhetoric. But what he has done eludes his accounting.

Iraq was a dreamland for Bush and the Republicans, a utopian experiment where nearly every Republican panacea, nostrum and magic potion was applied. This utopia, administered by the Coalition Provisional Authority, employed more than 1,500 people in the Green Zone and lasted from April 2003 through June 2004. But the experiment bore little resemblance to past American utopian efforts, like the benign primitive socialist Brook Farm in Massachusetts, run by Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott, who wrote "Little Women"), and memorialized by one of its participants, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his novel "The Blithedale Romance." In it, he described a "knot of dreamers" getting close to the soil. In the Green Zone, there were indeed dreamers, but mainly rogues, schemers and, above all, bunglers.

The true story of this weird American social experiment conducted between the Tigris and the Euphrates is told in a book to be published next week, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who was the Washington Post reporter in Baghdad. There have been other books on the CPA, written by disillusioned officials, but Chandrasekaran's offers compelling new details. His tale of innocence and pillage is recounted in a journalistic narrative of facts that speak for themselves and cut through the fog of official war rhetoric.

The Green Zone, according to Chandrasekaran, was "Baghdad's Little America," an insular bubble where Americans went to familiar fast-food joints, watched the latest movies, lived in air-conditioned comfort, had their laundry cleaned and pressed promptly, drove GMC Suburbans and listened to a military FM radio station, "Freedom Radio," that played "classic rock and rah-rah messages." Most Americans in the Green Zone wore suede combat boots. In the office of Dan Senor, the CPA press secretary, only one of his three TVs was turned on -- to Fox News.

Jay Garner, a retired lieutenant general, was appointed the head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the precursor to the CPA. On his way to Iraq, Garner asked the neoconservative Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, for the planning memos and documents for postwar Iraq. Feith told him there were none. Garner was never shown the State Department's 17 volumes of planning titled "The Future of Iraq" or the CIA's analyses. Feith's former law partner, Michael Mobbs, was appointed head of civil administration. Mobbs had no background in the Middle East or in civil administration. "He just cowered in his room most of the time," one former ambassador recalled. Mobbs lasted two weeks.

Garner was "a deer in the headlights," said Timothy Carney, a former ambassador recruited for ORHA. Feith and the neocons assumed their favorite, Ahmed Chalabi, and his exiles would seamlessly take power and the rest would be a glide path. After Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld allowed the looting of Iraqi ministries -- "Freedom's untidy," he said -- the U.S. officials supposedly building the new Iraq took weeks to survey the charred ruins. "I never knew what our plans were," Garner said. Rumsfeld personally tried to cut every single State Department officer from Garner's team. Soon, Garner himself fell into disfavor, and a replacement was sought. Moderate Republicans, like William Cohen, a former secretary of defense, were vetoed as being not the "right kind of Republican." L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer III, an experienced rightward-leaning diplomat, was selected. Henry Kissinger told Colin Powell at the time that Bremer, who had worked at Kissinger Associates, was "a control freak."

Bremer claims he argued with Rumsfeld over the failure to commit half a million troops to provide security in the country. But Bremer told Chandrasekaran on the spot, "I think we've got as many soldiers as we need here right now." Feith's office drew up an order banning members of the Baath Party, the only party permitted in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, from holding any responsible position in government or business. Of course, those were just about the only trained personnel in Iraq, and many of them belonged to the party to hold their jobs. "You're going to drive 50,000 Baathists underground before nightfall," warned Garner. "Don't do this." Immediately after receiving Garner's caution, Bremer announced the purge. Then Bremer disbanded the Iraqi military at the suggestion of Feith and Walter Slocombe, a consultant brought in by Feith, who had preceded Feith in his job in the Clinton administration and was now on board. Chandrasekaran asked a former soldier about the disbanded army, "What happened to everyone there? Did they join the new army?" The reply came back: "They're all insurgents now."

Next page: After accomplishing nothing, Kerik left Iraq