Larsson läser
Janerik Larsson
Janerik Larsson
Det finns böcker som är värda att ständigt återkomma till om man vill förstå tillståndet i världen. Rajiv Chandrasekaran var Washington Posts byråchef i Baghdad efter den amerikanska invasionen och i sin bok ”Imperial Life in the Emerald City” berättade han i skrämmande detalj om den amerikanska ockupationsmaktens totala brist på kompetens, om hur ockupationsadministrationen bidrog till det kaos vi ser idag.
Moisés Naím recenserade boken när den kom 2006. Han inledde sin recension så här:
When President Bush announced in May 2003 that he was appointing L. Paul Bremer as the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq, I received an e-mail from one of his former business colleagues: ”I just heard that Jerry [Bremer’s nickname] will be running Iraq. And the Iraqis thought that the worst we could do was to bomb them.”
At the time, I just smiled and dismissed the message. Three years later, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s extraordinary book made me realize how tragically prescient that e-mail had been. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is full of jaw-dropping tales of the myriad large and small ways in which Bremer and his team poured fuel into the lethal cauldron that is today’s Iraq. He was not alone and had many eager and powerful partners in Washington, Baghdad and elsewhere. Still, by reporting on daily life and decision making inside the Green Zone, the cloistered compound that housed Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), Chandrasekaran shows how incomplete our conventional wisdom is about what went wrong in Iraq.
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Take the case of Capt. John Smathers, a reservist and personal-injury lawyer charged with bringing some order to the chaotic traffic jams that ensued after U.S. authorities eliminated all import duties and the country was flooded by imported used cars. The solution? Download Maryland’s motor-vehicle code from the Internet, translate it into Arabic and, after much haggling and revision, have Bremer sign it into law. CPA Order 86 included provisions such as, ”Pedestrians walking during darkness or cloudy weather shall wear light or reflective clothing.”
Micromanaging and emulating U.S. institutions was also the instinct of Jay Hallen, the clueless 24-year-old in charge of reopening the Baghdad stock market. His approach was to create one patterned after the New York Stock Exchange. (No, it didn’t work.) Nor was Hallen the only inexperienced twentysomething CPA staffer given responsibilities for which he was utterly unprepared. Six of the ”ten young gofers” that the CPA had requested from the Pentagon to handle minor administrative tasks found themselves managing Iraq’s $13-billion budget. Where did the Pentagon recruit them? From the Heritage Foundation; they had sent their resumes there, looking for work in that conservative think tank.
When so much money is combined with organizational chaos, a state of emergency and the expectation that powerful friends in Washington would provide any needed cover, corruption is inevitable. Sure enough, Chandrasekaran offers tales of corruption among American contractors that read like dispatches from a kleptocratic banana republic.
Chandrasekaran har också skrivit en bok om den amerikanska ockupantens svårigheter i Afghanistan: ”Little America. The War Within the War for Afghanistan” (2012).
Rajiv Chandrasekaran är senior correspondent och associate editor på Washington Post där han arbetat sedan 1994.