Imperial Life in the Emerald City

From inside a surreal bubble of pure Americana known as the Green Zone, the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority attempted to rule Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Drawing on interviews and internal documents, Rajiv Chandrasekaran tells the memorable story of this ill-prepared attempt to build American democracy in a war-torn Middle Eastern country, detailing not only the risky disbanding of the Iraqi army and the ludicrous attempt to train the new police force, but absurdities such as the aide who based Baghdad's new traffic laws on those of the state of Maryland, downloaded from the net, and the twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance put in charge of revitalising Baghdad's stock exchange. "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" is American reportage at its best.

Winner of BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2007 Short-listed for British Book Awards: Waterstones Newcomer of the Year Award 2008 Short-listed for Guardian First Book Award 2007

“'This book is indispensable'”

'Black comedy, set in the graveyard of the neo-conservative dream. Superb' John le Carre 'The best account I have read of why the American occupation of Iraq has gone so drastically wrong ... An exceptional piece of work, well researched, well written and well judged ... I cannot remember a book that does more to enhance our understanding of the country than this one' Said K. Aburish, Spectator 'It's an extraordinary work of journalism that provides one of the most powerful cases yet made against the disastrous adventure in Iraq. Like a documentary Catch-22, this gripping book shows how the Bush administration's abject failure to plan for the period after the invasion gave rise to a toxic mixture of tragedy and farce' Hari Kunzru, Guardian Books of the Year 2007 'Graham Greene would have loved Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a painfully funny account of the blundering American occupation of Iraq. It confirms everything he wrote in The Quiet American' Philip French, Guardian Books of the Year 2007

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assisting managing editor of the Washington Post, where he has worked since 1994. He previously served the Post as a bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo and Southeast Asia, and as a correspondent covering the war in Afghanistan. He recently completed a term as journalist-in-residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, and was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an unprecedented account of life in Baghdad's Green Zone, a walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming pools that was the headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq...The Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran takes us with him into the Zone: into 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 theatre that screened shoot-'em-up films, an all-you-could-eat buffet piled high with pork, a shopping mall that sold pornographic movies, a parking lot filled with shiny new SUVs, and a snappy dry-cleaning service-much of it run by Halliburton. Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up. ..Drawing on hundreds of interviews and internal documents, Chandrasekaran tells the story of the people and ideas that inhabited the Green Zone during the occupation, from the imperial viceroy L. Paul Bremer III to the fleet of men hired to implement the idea that Americans could build a Jeffersonian democracy in an embattled Middle Eastern country.

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