U.S. strategy creates a disastrous Oz-like self-delusion

July 30, 2007

Here's a sample from the best "Why did the chicken cross the road" joke out of the Iraq War.

U.S. government CPA: The fact that the chicken crossed the road shows that decision-making authority has switched to the chicken in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on, the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.

Halliburton: We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost $326,004.

CIA: We cannot confirm or deny any involvement in the chicken road-crossing incident.

Translators: Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request.

There's more and it's all very funny, ha ha. The joke, by a young staffer in the Coalition Provisional Authority, which "ran" Iraq after the U.S. invasion, is in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone. The book just won this year's £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize. It's written with an easy clarity, a nice magazine style, making it all the more painful to realize each word equals an Iraqi corpse.

Emerald City maps out how the Americans had made so many basic errors in planning, action, mapping, guarding, hiring, logistics — you name it they fluffed it — that the occupation was doomed before it began. Then you, reader, can have healing, or closure, or whatever the already years-ago unfashionable word was, and move on to why a massive slaughter of Iraqi civilians, insurgents and coalition soldiers continues to this day.

Emerald City

The Emerald City is the Green Zone, the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad that the author calls "Versailles on the Tigris." Run by Halliburton, it looked like a casino. American soldiers and staffers were presented with swimming pools, all-you-can-eat buffets of American fast food, T-shirts with slogans like Who's your Baghdaddy?, Chinese take-out, free cell phones, pirated DVDs, liquor and fatally, no contact with the Iraqis just outside the gates. Americans could spend a year in Emerald City and never meet an Iraqi. (Iraqis weren't considered sufficiently trustworthy to enter the City.)

The CPA needed staff to run a devastated country. But job applicants went through a bizarre interview process. They were asked, Chandrasekaran writes, if they supported Roe v. Wade, and if they had voted for George W. Bush. Resumes of people highly experienced in reconstruction were tossed in favour of those sent by contributors to the Republican Party. The attitude was reminiscent of the Soviet Communists. Were you a Party member in good standing or not?

You were not hired for expertise.

Hire that man!

Chandrasekaran, then the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief, writes about the overwhelmed Americans he met.

John Agresto had been hired to rehabilitate Iraq's universities, with 375,000 students on 22 campuses looted bare after the Americans failed to guard Baghdad structures after the invasion. His main qualification was running a Santa Fe college with 500 students. But he was connected. Donald Rumsfeld's wife had been on his board and Dick Cheney's wife had worked with him at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

When it was decided that the Baghdad Stock Exchange had to be rebuilt, the Americans hired a 24-year-old real estate agent who had not a) followed the stock market b) studied finance or economics. But he knew someone who knew someone who knew Paul Bremer, and he was in.

The real villain was Viceroy L. Paul Bremer III, as he called himself. There is not room here, or even in the book, to relay the chasm between Bremer's plans and the paucity of his achievements. Preaching the free-market mantra, Bremer crippled the Iraqi economy by firing every experienced person in government and the military, leaving 650,000 men out of work and full of hate for their American "liberators."

Bremer's neocon dreams made him abolish the 100 per cent tax on imported cars. What happened? Smart Iraqis bought used cars cheap in Europe and brought them into Iraq. The number of cars doubled, clogging the streets and creating a massive and permanent traffic jam. Bremer then hired a personal injury lawyer to come up with a traffic code, in the end lifted from the State of Maryland and ignored by anyone with the sense to expect bombs buried in the streets.

Ideology: brawn trumps brain

The one question Imperial Life in the Emerald City doesn't really attempt to answer is why a small group of Americans with presumably good intentions destroyed Iraq and incidentally a president to whom they were at that time devoted.

Chamdrasekaran does discuss ideology. Neocons are big on ideology.

Charles Ferguson, an American neocon who has just made a documentary, No End in Sight, about the failure in Iraq, was interviewed on Salon.com about this question. Hey, it could be Murphy's Law, he said. Or it could be the "individual psychologies" of the American officials running a debacle that has cost $1.8 trillion so far and is, according to the journalist George Packer, the worst foreign policy blunder in American history.

Such excuses are feeble.

But there is another possible reason, apart from human evil, which is arguable but beyond my remit here. The Americans who forced their way into the Vietnam War and suffered a spectacular, ignominious defeat were supposedly the "best and the brightest."

These Bushies are … the worst and the whitest? The dumb and the doctrinaire? No one, aside from columnists like the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente, thinks Bush is a smart president. He's a real intellectual whippersnapper by her standards.

Maybe the problem was the glorification of stupidity. This is a terrible time to be a questioning, intelligent, American even though I believe they are by far in the majority. I honour them and yet I watch them being driven underground. They dare not speak. They are ridiculed. They can't get jobs in government and can form no power base in Congress or the Senate. Look at Sen. Russ Feingold, surrounded by the stony faces of his so-called fellow Democrats as he suggests censuring Bush.

Stupid people travel in packs. They terrorize the clever, who tend to travel alone because they quarrel with each other over minor points and generally prefer reading to socializing. Like gangs of hoodies setting hobos on fire in the city streets, they silence everyone.

Try reading an Ann Coulter column, written this very week, about how New York Muslim taxi drivers stink. Try watching the Senate committee testimony of Alberto Gonzales, simultaneously lying and faking amnesia.

These people couldn't organize snack time in a day care. They panic when their toenails grow long and call for mommy. And they rule nations.

So it goes.