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Sign up todayImperial Life in the Emerald City
Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
Narrator
Ray Porter
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Length
10 hours 18 minutes
Language
English
The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, takes us into the Green Zone, headquarters for the American occupation in Iraq. In this bubble separated from wartime realities, the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competes with the distractions of a Little America—a half-dozen bars, a disco, a shopping mall—much of it run by Halliburton. While qualified Americans willing to serve in Iraq are screened for their views on Roe v. Wade, the country is put into the hands of inexperienced twentysomethings chosen for their Republican Party loyalty. Ignoring what Iraqis say they want or need, the team pursues irrelevant neoconservative solutions and pie-in-the-sky policies instead of rebuilding looted buildings and restoring electricity production. Their almost comic initiatives anger the locals and fuel the insurgency.
This is a quietly devastating portrait of imperial folly, and an essential book for anyone who wants to understand those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran is the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post where he has worked since 1994. He previously served the Post as a bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo, and Southeast Asia and as a correspondent covering the war in Afghanistan. He lives in Washington, DC.
Ray Porter is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator and fifteen-year veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including Almost Famous, ER, and Frasier.
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Reviews
“Absolutely brilliant. It is eyewitness history of the first order...It should be read by anyone who wants to understand how things went so badly wrong in Iraq.”
“A vividly detailed portrait of the Green Zone and the Coalition Provisional Authority that becomes a metaphor for the administration’s larger failings in Iraq…often reads like something out of Catch-22 or MASH.”
“As chilling an indictment of America’s tragic cultural myopia as Graham Greene’s prescient 1955 novel of the American debacle in Indochina, The Quiet American.”
“Extraordinary…Indispensable…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.”
“An eye-opening tour of ineptitude, misdirection, and the perils of democracy-building.”
“With acuity and a fine sense of the absurd, the author peels back the roof to reveal an ant heap of arrogance, ineptitude, and hayseed provincialism.”
“Narrator Ray Porter delivers the author’s story of hubris, corruption, excess, and destruction with the perfect degree of revulsion, outrage, and disdain…[Chandrasekaran] misses not a detail or nuance in this unintentional black comedy‚ nor does the highly professional Porter.”
“A devastating indictment of the post-invasion failures of the Bush administration.”
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