Mission Imperial = Surreal Life inside the Green Zone = The Guardian

[L. Coyote]

Mission imperial

While Iraqis struggled in the chaos of Baghdad after the invasion, the Americans sent to rebuild the nation led a cocooned existence in the centre of the capital - complete with booze, hot dogs and luxury villas. In the first of three extracts from his new book, Rajiv Chandrasekaran exposes life in the Green Zone.

Monday February 19, 2007 - The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2016264,00.html

"... the food was always American, often with a Southern flavour. A buffet featured grits, cornbread and a bottomless barrel of pork: sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner......

None of the succulent tomatoes or crisp cucumbers grown in Iraq made it into the salad bar. US government regulations dictated that everything, even the water in which hot dogs were boiled, be shipped in from approved suppliers in other nations .....

When the Americans arrived, the engineers assigned to transform Saddam's palace into the seat of the American occupation chose a marble-floored conference room the size of a gymnasium to serve as the mess hall. Halliburton, the defence contractor hired to run the palace, brought in dozens of tables, hundreds of stacking chairs and a score of glass-covered buffets. Seven days a week, the Americans ate under Saddam's crystal chandeliers.

........

[Ghost Dog]

1. k&r. Describes early days: Surreal, heartless, ignorant from the start.

...
Even in the first months after the fall of Saddam's government, Schroeder was incredulous when I told him that I lived in what he and others called the Red Zone, that I drove around without a security detail, that I ate at local restaurants, that I visited Iraqis in their homes. "What's it like out there?" he asked. I described the pleasure of walking through al-Shorja market, and of having tea in cafes in the old quarter. I spoke about discussions of Iraqi culture and history that occurred when I went to the homes of my Iraqi friends for lunch. The more I talked, the more I felt like an extraterrestrial describing life on another planet.

From inside the Green Zone, the real Baghdad - the checkpoints, the bombed-out buildings, the paralysing traffic jams - could have been a world away. The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin's call to prayer, never drifted over the walls. The fear on the faces of US troops was rarely seen by the denizens of the palace. The acrid smoke of a detonated car bomb didn't fill the air. The sub-Saharan privation and wild-west lawlessness that gripped one of the world's most ancient cities swirled around the walls, but on the inside, the calm sterility of a US subdivision prevailed.

One morning, as a throng of Shia pilgrims jostled their way inside the Imam Kadhim shrine in northern Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt. A second bomber waited round the corner and set off his belt when survivors ran away from the first blast. Then a third bomber blew himself up. And a fourth. The courtyard of the shrine filled with smoke and the screams of the dying. Blood pooled on the concrete floor. Dazed young men staggered about seeking help. Other survivors stacked the maimed on to wooden carts and pushed them toward wailing ambulances.

When I arrived at the scene an hour later, I saw corpses covered with white sheets. Arms and fingers had been blown onto third-story balconies. Piles of shoes belonging to the dead dotted the floor. Later, I saw dozens of bodies piled outside the morgue, covered with blue sheets, rotting under the sun.

That evening, I met a group of CPA staffers for dinner in the palace. Nobody mentioned the bombings. The shrine was just a few miles north of the Green Zone, no more than a 10-minute drive away. Had they heard about what had happened? Did they know dozens had died? "Yeah, I saw something about it on the office television," said the man to my right. "But I didn't watch the full report. I was too busy working on my democracy project"
...

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Part 2: The Project ("I'm not here for the Iraqis, I'm here for George Bush.")

The opportunity to participate in the US-led effort to reconstruct Iraq as part of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which ran Iraq's government from April 2004 until June 2004, attracted all manner of Americans: restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon. To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for defence department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

The selection often followed a call from a well-connected Republican on behalf of a friend or trusted colleague. Some people were personally recruited by the president.

O'Beirne's staff asked questions in job interviews that could have got an employer in the private sector hauled into court. (The Pentagon was exempted from most employment regulations because it hired people - using an obscure provision in federal law - as temporary political appointees.) Did you vote for George Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two CPA staffers said that they were asked if they supported Roe v Wade (the ruling that effectively legalised abortion in the US). One former CPA employee, who had an office near the White House liaison staff, wrote an email to a friend describing the recruitment process: "I watched resumés of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to 'the president's vision for Iraq' was 'uncertain'."
...
The decision to send the loyal and the willing, instead of the best and the brightest, is now regarded by many as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many who participated in the reconstruction effort.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2017023,00.html

[Scriptor Ignotus]

3. with iraq's unemployment rate around 27-50%

(according to this 2005 article http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/19/AR2005061900729.html)

i find it unacceptable that we outsourced so many mundane services that Iraqis could easily have done. Laundry was shipped out to Kuwait to be done, instead of at some Iraqi industrial laundromat.

I'm reading this book right now, and it is absoultely amazing. We seriously had the biggest jagovs runnings this thing. The few competent people we did have in charge had their hands tied by Rumsfeld or Cheney or some other neo-con.