In his April 2003 paper entitled, “A Unified Mission Plan for Post Hostilities Iraq,” retired Lt. General Jay Garner, the first chief executive of the Coalition Provisional Authority, wrote that “History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.” During the CPA’s yearlong reign in Iraq those activities were extremely ineffective as documented in Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief. It is an embarrassing indictment of the incompetence and hubris that affected almost every step of post-war decision-making. “We were so busy trying to build a Jeffersonian democracy and a capitalist economy that we neglected the big picture,” an aide to L. Paul Bremer III, the second head of the CPA, admitted in late May 2004. “We squandered an enormous opportunity and we didn’t realize it until everything blew up in our faces.”

Through a series of interviews, Chandrasekaran makes clear in his reporting that the problems arise from many sources. Pettiness that would be expected between junior high school girls reigned at the Pentagon as they fought tooth and nail against many decisions made by State Department and those sympathetic to their ideas. The Americans in charge didn’t appear to care about what was best for Iraq or the United States. In the book, they come off like a bunch of sycophants and hot dogs who missed their chance to be cowboys in the American Old West and were joined by hucksters looking for a quick buck. Their ignorance of the Iraqi culture and at times of the job they were assigned caused major problems. There were also too many pro-business, free-market Republicans who couldn’t understand that their ideals of limited government couldn’t work in a place that now had no government after the U.S. military removed it.

Chandrasekaran shows that some volunteers weren’t qualified for the jobs they were assigned because James O’Beirne, White House Liaison to the Pentagon, was more interested in candidates having the “right political credentials,” according to Frederick Smith, Deputy Director of the CPA’s Washington office. O’Beirne wanted to know how a person voted in 2000 and their position on abortion, which was rather ironic considering how many lives were terminated early by the invasion of Iraq.  It explains why 24-year-old Jay Hallen, who had no background in economics or finance, was assigned to remake and rebuild the Baghdad Stock Exchange and why Frederick M Burkle, Jr., a physician with an impressive resume of degrees and international experience was replaced as the man in charge of fixing Iraq’s health-care system by social worker James K Haveman Jr., whose only related experience was being “a director for International Aid a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity.” 

Of course, the turmoil caused by foreign fighters and insurgents added to the difficulties of the CPA and the Iraqi people. Chandrasekaran mentions a few incidents, but since his focus was on the Americans in the Green Zone, that aspect doesn't get full coverage.  Instead, he illustrates how many CPA decisions fueled strife and dissent among the Iraqis. John Agresto, the man assigned to fix Iraq’s university system, spoke with Chandrasekaran and felt “the establishing of a quota for Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds on the Governing Council, and then filling many of those seats with politicians and religious leaders who were more interested in doling out favors to their supporters than in doing what was best for their country” was a mistake. Making the Iraqis focus on their tribes added to the civil war fighting, although it did sound like the members of GC had acted no differently than the U.S. Congress and Senate.