Tim Worstall

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Excellent:

If Imperial Life in the Emerald City were a novel it would be hailed as a wartime black comedy to rival Catch 22 and M*A*S*H.

Sadly, for the current US Administration and the people of Iraq, it has won the world’s richest prize for non-fiction.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran received the Samuel Johnson Prize and a cheque for £30,000 at the Savoy hotel in London last night for his scathing depiction of life inside the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Baroness Kennedy, the chairman of the judges, said: "Imperial Life in the Emerald City is up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years – as fine as [John] Hersey on Hiroshima and [Truman] Capote’s In Cold Blood. The writing is cool, exact and never overstated and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American action is revealed.”

This blog’s Baghdad Correspondent gets a name check in that book. You know what they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

The word from there at present is that it’ll all be over by Christmas. Perhaps not with the flags flying and the bands playing.

In

5 responses

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    I’m trying to think of any substantial consolation for this whole rash, foolish, half-arsed business.

    Reply
  2. eagle bomber Avatar
    eagle bomber

    Oh, dearieme. How come the only alternative to “this … business” is supposed to be some kind of status quo. Saddam’s happy families flying kites! Have you travelled forward in time and checked what possible alternatives may have been? Prove to me that the alternative would not have been Uday with nukes!
    The substantial consolation is that Iraq is rid of arguably the most aggressive and callous despot in the world. Iraq now has a chance of creating a decent country, at least by ME standards.
    Maybe the violence that is happening now in Iraq was, perhaps, actually inevitable. What would have happened when Saddam did eventually die? I could go on, but I’m sure you understand what I’m saying.
    The administration of Iraq post-invasion could have been better handled, much better handled if you like, but to believe what is happening there is the worst of all possible alternatives is wrong.

    Reply
  3. john b Avatar
    john b

    “Prove to me that the alternative would not have been Uday with nukes!”
    Given that Uday was universally reviled even among regime insiders, and that Iraq’s prospects of acquiring anything even vaguely nuclear in the environment after the 1990 war were entirely and demonstrably zero (hence the whole ‘WMD’ conflation of not-very-scary chemical weapons, which we thought Saddam probably had, and very-scary nuclear ones, which we knew he didn’t), that one’s proved and I claim my £5.
    I’d agree that collapse into a sectarian, murderous failed state controlled by Saudi-backed fanatics and Iran-backed militias might well have been a plausible outcome after Saddam’s death.
    Not so sure that bringing that situation about a few years earlier than it would have happened anyway is something we should be terribly proud about, though…

    Reply
  4. dsquared Avatar
    dsquared

    [but to believe what is happening there is the worst of all possible alternatives is wrong]
    I like this idea that the implicit benchmark is the worst of all possible alternatives. What other large government projects do you propose to judge against this standard? The Olympics logo project looks pretty good if you consider that the alternative was to spray Ebola over a primary school.

    Reply
  5. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    I’m trying to think of any substantial consolation for this whole rash, foolish, half-arsed business.
    Kuwaitis no longer live in fear of an invasion, meaning they have been in a position to vastly upgrade their oilfields and increase production.
    The US military no longer have to keep an army camped permanently in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in order to contain Saddam Hussein and enforce UN resolutions whilst watching France and Russia – who voted for those resolutions – normalise relations in breach of those resolutions.
    The US, if it gets tied up somewhere else in the world, Korea for instance, knows that it does not have to worry about Kuwait, Qatar, or Saudi being invaded by Iraq.

    Reply

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