On the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, Al-Ahram Weekly reviews two books on the imperial hubris shaping life within Baghdad's green zone and the three trillion dollar cost of the war, together with a third that appeared immediately after the invasion and gives a wider context to Bush's adventure in Babylon Behind the Oz-like curtain Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, London: Bloomsbury, 2008. pp368 Anniversaries are occasions to remember. They are times to step back from day-to- day life and the barrage of constant news updates to reflect on how things all started and how they have changed. Even US President George W. Bush recently acknowledged the question "of whether the war was worth fighting". Five years after the first bomb was dropped on Baghdad, the war in Iraq has no reasonable end in sight. But it wasn't always this way. US journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran's chilling bestseller, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, reminds readers of the cavalier American optimism at the start of the Iraq invasion and chronicles the mistakes committed in the first year of the occupation that crippled any hope of timely success. Chandrasekaran, the former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief, throws open the Oz-like curtain of Baghdad's Green Zone where the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, operated in a surreal fantasyland. Inside the walled-off compound of the "Emerald City," built around Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace, Americans avoided the grim reality of the surrounding war zone, eating pork in the dining halls and sipping beer by the pool. Chandrasekaran's book penetrates this air-conditioned bubble and details the step-by-step process by which the Americans bungled the first year of the occupation of Iraq. Though it deals exclusively with the first year after the invasion, Imperial Life in the Emerald City is a relevant source on the fifth anniversary as the cost of the mistakes detailed in the book remains high. "From inside the Green Zone," Chandrasekaran writes, "the real Baghdad -- the checkpoints, the bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing 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 American 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 an American subdivision prevailed." By looking at the initiatives and subsequent blunders of the individuals handpicked by the Bush administration to govern and rebuild Iraq, Chandrasekaran reexamines the mix of arrogance, romanticism and denial that have shaped the entire American operation. The disregard for reality, ignorance of Iraqi history and culture and misallocation of funds inside the Green Zone mirror the larger failings of the war. Many of the individuals in Chandrasekaran's portrayal seemed well intentioned and genuinely optimistic about the American project. But perhaps this was because so many in the Green Zone were just that: green. The CPA assigned vast and complex tasks to staffers barely out of college, some with little experience beyond working on the 2000 Bush/Cheney election campaign. Knowledgeable experts were replaced by political loyalists. This inexperienced staff of cronies failed to restore electricity and other basic utilities to the bombed city while it allocated already inadequate funds to low-priority items, like expunging distorted history textbooks and reforming the stock market. "It was like going into a war zone and saying, Oh, let's cure halitosis," Chandrasekaran writes. An even larger problem with the American occupation was the Americans' treatment of Iraq in 2003 as if it were Berlin in 1945. De-Baathification, considered one of the costliest mistakes of the initial occupation, seemed to mirror the de-Nazification of Germany after 1945, though the circumstances were vastly different. Furthermore, Iraq was no place for a modern Marshall Plan, as Saddam Hussein's government had been subsidising crumbling industries for decades. "Freed from the grip of their dictator," Chandrasekaran writes, "the Iraqis believed that they should have been free to chart their own destiny, to select their own interim government and to manage the reconstruction of their shattered nation. Their country wasn't Germany or Japan, a thoroughly defeated World War II aggressor to be ruled by the victorious. Iraqis needed help -- good advice and ample resources -- from a support corps of well-meaning foreigners, not a full-scale occupation with imperial Americans cloistered in a palace of the tyrant, eating bacon and drinking beer, surrounded by Gurkhas and blast walls." The American agenda collided with Iraqi sovereignty over the issue of writing a new constitution for Iraq. Once the alleged weapons of mass destruction had been dissolved as an excuse for the war, bringing democracy to Iraq became the CPA's top priority, trumping safety and basic services. But according to the Bush administration democracy could not be left to the Iraqis. Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, made the catastrophic mistake of ignoring and disrespecting Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, whose fatwa called for the Iraqi constitution to be drafted by elected Iraqi representatives. American arrogance and lack of forethought were also on display when Bremer shut down the newspaper of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, inciting a violent insurgency that rages to this day. Unusually for a book of this kind, Chandrasekaran keeps personal analysis of the events in the book to a minimum. He lets American ineptitude and hubris speak -- or rather scream -- for themselves. It is as impossible to put down Chandrasekaran's account of disastrous decision after disastrous decision in Imperial Life in the Emerald City as it is to look away from a gruesome car crash. Reviewed by Hannah Mintz ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Three trillion and counting Joseph E. Stiglitz & Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, New York: Norton, 2008. pp311 Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prizewinner in economics, former World Bank chief economist and former advisor to the Clinton administration on economic matters, emerged from the normally discreet world of the professional economist in 2002 with the publication of Globalization and its Discontents, which became an international bestseller. Stiglitz, unlike many of his peers, seems to have felt a need to explain the dismal science to the laity, as well as some of the decisions taken in its name. In his new book, jointly written with Linda Bilmes, a professor of economics at Harvard, Stiglitz has turned his attention to the US-led invasion and continuing military presence in Iraq, aiming to put a dollar figure on costs thus far, chiefly to the United States. The figure suggested is around three trillion dollars -- some three thousand billion dollars -- though Stiglitz and Bilmes also include the much smaller costs of US operations in Afghanistan and give both an upper and a lower estimate. It could be rather more (their estimate is "realistic- moderate"), or, in a "best-case scenario," it could be rather less. Whichever way you look at them, the figures are astronomical. While the "we" employed throughout the book refers to the American electorate, which twice voted for the present US administration in presidential elections, and to the American taxpayers who must eventually pay the three trillion dollar bill of that administration's foreign policy, there is also a wider "we" implied throughout. While this we, outside the United States, did not vote for the conflict in Iraq, and indeed largely opposed it, it too is paying the price in the form of that conflict's wider macroeconomic effects, whether in the form of record oil prices or inflationary pressures on a range of goods, including foodstuffs. Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate that between US$5 ("conservative") and US$10 ("realistic") of the current oil price of around US$100 a barrel can be attributed directly to the conflict in Iraq. Oil prices before the conflict started stood at around US$25 a barrel and were predicted to hover around that figure on the futures markets. In case British readers should feel that the United Kingdom has got off lightly in terms of the costs of the conflict, Stiglitz and Bilmes's estimates suggest that this is not the case, and Britain is less well-placed than is the United States to absorb its escalating costs. They give an estimate of 20 billion pounds to 2010 (around US$40 billion), dwarfing the one billion reputedly set aside by then UK finance minister Gordon Brown before the conflict started. While the 1991 Gulf War, as the authors point out, in large part fought by the United States, was in fact largely paid for by Arab countries, among them Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the present conflict is likely to be paid for in one way or another by all of us and for many years to come. In their preface to The Three Trillion Dollar War, Stiglitz and Bilmes write that the US-led invasion of Iraq was "a terrible mistake." While the aims of the invasion, they point out, changed over time, sometimes having to do with alleged weapons of mass destruction produced by the Saddam regime, and, when these were not found, an American campaign "to bring democracy to the Middle East," the result has been an Iraq that is worse off than it was before the invasion took place. To date, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died, some five million have become internal or external refugees, some 4,000 US troops have been killed and a further 58,000 injured, and the US is currently spending US$12.5 billion a month on a military presence that most Iraqis, according to the opinion polls cited in The Three Trillion Dollar War, feel is making the civil- war situation in their country worse and in any case is not making it better. "The quality of life in Iraq," the authors write, "measured by the lack of electricity, the high unemployment figures, the mass exodus from the country, the huge numbers displaced within the country, the collapse of the middle class, and the soaring violence suggest that, beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi people have seen little good come of the war." Much of The Three Trillion Dollar War is given over to the technical details of how the authors arrive at their figures -- how they do the sums -- betraying the book's origins in academic and professional papers. However, a main message that comes across for American taxpayers is how the conflict has resulted in displacing expenditure away from health, social security and education. What Stiglitz and Bilmes call the "opportunity costs" of the conflict, aside from its simple dollar ticket, have been enormous. "A trillion dollars could have built 8 million additional housing units, could have hired some 15 million additional public school teachers for one year; could have paid for 120 million children to attend a year of Head Start [an educational programme]; or insured 530 million children for health care for one year; or provided 43 million students with four-year scholarships at public universities. Now multiply those numbers by three." Those who have benefited from the war, by contrast, have been the arms manufacturers and US military contracting firms, for whom Iraq has turned out to be a bonanza. These are "the only real winners in this war," the authors write, pointing to the salience in American life of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex." In their calculation of the conflict's macroeconomic effects, they write that "we need to dispel the common myth that wars are good for the economy... Money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain: had it been spent on investment... the economy's productivity would have been increased and future output would have been greater." For Stiglitz and Bilmes, US spending on the war, financed by borrowing and pushed through Congress under "emergency" appropriations, has been the equivalent of taking out a mortgage on the future. "The simple message," they write, is that "there is no free lunch, and there are no free wars." The vast expenditures entered into in Iraq could have been better spent elsewhere, to positive, rather than negative, effect. Aside from the need within the US to make investments for the future in its creaking health, social security and public education systems, there is also the question of how the US might have acted to use its wealth for genuine international benefit. "The United States gives some $5 billion a year to Africa, the poorest continent in the world: that amounts to less than ten days' fighting... We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might actually have succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the people there. Even more modest ambitions could have been achieved for a fraction of what has already been spent on Iraq. The world has committed itself to eradicating illiteracy by 2015 [under the UN Millennium Goals]. Fully funding that campaign would cost some $8 billion a year -- roughly two weeks of fighting the war." Finally, the authors feel that the American electorate has been kept in the dark not only about the true scale of the casualty figures in Iraq but also regarding the conflict's true costs. Their book includes a set of nine recommendations, ranging from improved accounting practices to enhanced congressional oversight, which, they feel, could help prevent the US from entering into similar engagements in the future. Perhaps Stiglitz and Bilmes felt the need to end their otherwise depressing book on an upbeat note: if these simple reforms were implemented, they imply, future acts of folly could be prevented. Let us hope that the kind of reforms they recommend will be implemented and that they are right. Reviewed by David Tresilian ------------------------------------------------------------------------ An elegy for Iraq Tariq Ali, Bush in Babylon, the Recolonisation of Iraq, London: Verso 2003. pp262 Five years ago this month Iraq fell victim to the US-led invasion. US President George W. Bush's famous statement, "mission accomplished," since the subject of much bitter humour, was followed by a tsunami of congratulatory words -- spoken, broadcast, written and sometimes even put into verse -- by young soldiers who did not know any better and who believed they were defending the United States and its way of life from savage Arab terrorists. Young Iraqi bloggers, overwhelmed by the havoc wrought on their lives, found some momentary solace in informing their friends across the world of their plight, while others used the Internet to more serious purpose, such as planning some kind of resistance. Yet, the Americans were far more vocal, first fiercely defending their "war on terrorism," and then creating excuses for the mess as the drama unfolded in a less than satisfactory way, or simply lapsing into a state of denial. "We are making progress in Iraq. It just takes time," a now nervous, but still patriotic, America was told. Whatever the real reasons were, Iraq and its ancient and proud civilisation were being crushed. Disdaining the noise of politicians, writer and filmmaker Tariq Ali has decided to consider the Iraqi disaster from a loftier vantage point in his Bush in Babylon, looking at the long history of conflict in Iraq and its role in the present Middle East quagmire. It is his way of mourning for a country whose proud traditions have been reduced to rubble in order to satisfy the exigencies of the new Euro-American imperialism. In his introduction, he writes that "this book combines Iraqi and Arab history and world politics. Without knowing the past it is impossible to understand what is happening today, and the history is presented here as a warning to both occupier and resister." Before demonstrating his scholarship, however, Ali articulates his love for the Arab people. It is not enough to review events and apportion blame. First it is necessary to cry tears over the lost countries of Palestine and Iraq, over the generations of children whose only dream has been to avenge their parents, and over one of the most ancient civilisations. Ali has invited a distinguished assembly of writers to the wake. Guest of honour is Hanna Batatu, the famous historian who died in 2000 before the attack on Iraq but who left behind an invaluable history of the country. The diaries of previous British ambassadors to Iraq are also brought into play, as are those of the founder of the Baghdad Museum, Gertrude Bell. Ali also includes conversations with Iraqi exiles and works by Arab writers, including the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani and Saudi novelist Abdel-Rahman Munif. There is no food or drink at Ali's wake for Iraq, since it is not performed in the Irish tradition. Only words and the memory of national songs and poems fill the hearts and minds of mourners celebrating the life of his Babylon. Ali is well aware that events, no matter how painful, pass and are eventually forgotten or pushed from the memories even of those who lived through them. But the words recording the events described in this book have a power of their own, and they live on. In his introduction to The Flag on the Mountain (2007) Ivo Zanic writes that "language with its figurative power to direct the imagination towards deeper cultural matters is essential for any political mobilization that wishes to engage the target audience as widely, deeply and enduringly as possible. Messages including political ones do not have just a single meaning, especially not just the most obvious, the most manifest. They also signify aspects of the phenomena that are not noticed on the surface of the text but are indicated in the form of transferred meanings. They need decoding, translating, which can be done only after establishing the links between the message and the experiential milieu, the social context in which it came into being." In his book, Ali has taken upon himself the task of collecting and interpreting messages from the Arab tradition, and, in a language shared with the victims of the new imperialism, he finds fresh hope in those messages. One day, the victims will be rid of the occupation. Ali does not intend to play the role of apologist for the Arabs. Instead, he announces in his introduction that he wants to discuss at length "the self-inflicted wounds of the Arab world...because without understanding their causes it will be difficult to move forward." Baghdad was once immensely rich and boasted great poets and artists, but the city's ministers were corrupt and its population given over to greed and intrigue. They had no respect for the Caliph, and their history was violent. More corrupt than all the others was the Caliph himself. Hulagu, the Mongol conqueror of Iraq, told him as much when he walked victorious into the Caliph's palace. When asked by the Mongol invader why he had not torn down the doors of his palace in order to make arrowheads, or advanced to the banks of the river to stop the enemy armies from crossing, the Caliph replied: "Such was God's will." Hulegu replied: "What will befall you is also God's will." The year was 1258, and Baghdad, writes Ali, "never recovered from that defeat." In his analysis of the situation in Iraq, Ali compares it to what is happening in Palestine and predicts that the new generations who have witnessed nothing but violence will become the resisters of tomorrow. They will be all the more ruthless for having witnessed the treatment meted out to their families by the foreign invaders and occupiers. Reviewed by Fayza Hassan
