Last night BBC Four showed a great two-part doc, No Plan, No Peace, about the disastrous and unbelievably misguided attempts to rebuild Iraq after the 2003 invasion. One of the interviewees was the Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, whose superb book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, I got for Christmas.
I'd never been convinced by Tony Blair's constant reassurances that he'd given considerable thought to what we'd do after getting rid of Saddam, but until reading this book I hadn't quite conceived how dumb the coalition had been. Comedy of errors doesn't do the Bush/Blair axis of idiocy's decisions justice.
Chandrasekaran spent more than a year reporting from the Green Zone, the fortified Little America that housed Saddam's Baghdad palace, where Americans watched pornos and scoffed all the pork they could eat. I could list some of the absurdities that he witnessed but Chandrasekaran does a much better job himself in this Daily Show interview with John Stewart.
A brilliant book. Highly recommended.
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