Imperial Life in the Emerald City

I recently finished listening to Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone as a book on CD. The book is marred by the author’s antipathy to the Bush Administration. The facts of the Iraq occupation and its cost are sufficiently damning that the journalist author did not need to “tell”; the basic facts would have “shown” the spectacular incompetence and waste of the U.S. effort (“show don’t tell” being the first rule of journalism). Despite this flaw, the book is well worth reading if only to see how grand government plans have unintended consequences. Right here in the U.S., via this new stimulus bill, we may be about to repeat many of our mistakes from Iraq.

One interesting point of the book is how mismanagement of automobile transportation can wreck a country. In Saddam’s Iraq gasoline was essentially free, costing perhaps 5 cents per gallon. Importing a car, however, was subject to high tariffs and some quotas. The result was that you could get anywhere within Baghdad in 15 minutes or less. The U.S. occupation eliminated the tariffs and quotas out of a belief that free trade was a unqualified good. Cars flooded in from the four corners of the world and Baghdad soon had such horrific traffic that Iraqi tempers boiled and American soldiers were at risk of attack any time they got stuck in their Humvees. What about the gasoline? Our bureaucrats decided that it would generate too much anger if we removed the gasoline subsidies, so gas remained a tiny fraction of the world price. With all of the extra cars on the road, Iraq’s refineries, even operated at full capacity, could not keep up with demand. The U.S. taxpayer was tapped to pay Halliburton to truck in vast quantities of gasoline from Kuwait and then re-sell that gas to Iraqis for 5 cents per gallon.

The electricity situation in Iraq is covered in great detail. Iraq hadn’t build new power plants for decades. Electricity was free and therefore Iraqis had no incentive to conserve. As the population ballooned, demand for electricity outstripped supply. Saddam simply cut off most of the country most of the time, leaving Baghdad as the only part of Iraq with continuous power. When the U.S. arrived, Iraqis and Americans decided that it was the responsibility of U.S. taxpayers to give every Iraqi unlimited 24/7 electricity power at no cost. This required making up for 20 years of neglected maintenance and powerplant construction. (We mostly failed at this effort, despite spending $billions.)

An overarching problem was that Iraqis prior to Saddam had been accustomed to one of the world’s best lifestyles. Without doing any work, they were guaranteed food, health care, education, electricity, and gasoline. Imported luxury goods were brought in by the government and sold at a fraction of their cost. An Iraqi who got a job with a government-owned factory was guaranteed a job for life, even if the factory was not competitive on the world market. All of this was paid for with oil revenue. The Iraqis assumed that with Saddam gone they should be able to return to their 1970s paradise and were angry when the U.S. did not give them what they deserved. The population of Iraq was about 10 million in the 1970s and is 28 million today. There is no way that oil revenues could keep pace with population growth and therefore, absent continuing drains on the U.S. taxpayer, Iraqis would either have to get to work or accept a lower standard of living.

Some of the details aren’t relevant to why we failed in Iraq, but they are entertaining. SAIC was given millions of dollars to run a media company in Iraq. They wanted a vehicle. Instead of buying one in Jordan or Kuwait and driving it to Baghdad (or buying one the car dealers in Baghdad who were making regular trips to Europe and bringing back cars), they bought a Hummer in the U.S. and chartered a DC-10 cargo plane to deliver it to Baghdad. The cost? At least $380,000. As this was a cost-plus contract, they earned a nice profit on top of the $380,000 spent.

The overall method of American occupation is so expensive that taxpayers should shudder in horror at the prospect of ever engaging in an Iraq-style nation-building experiment again. Billions of dollars were spent to make the Green Zone just like the U.S. Americans insisted on 24/7 power and air conditioning, big-screen televisions, and food just like you’d get in a North Carolina cafeteria. All of the food, which included copious quantities of pork, was flown in from Europe or the U.S. We can complain about Halliburton all that we want, but after reading about all of the stuff that Halliburton was asked to do, you might conclude that we got a bargain.

Iraqis interviewed by the author ended up blaming us for everything. In Saddam’s socialist paradise, all Iraqis were created equal. The U.S. occupation established U.S.-style ethnic group quotas for important jobs, making people conscious of their Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish background (the Christians and Jews, remnants of the original population of the country prior to the Arab invasion, had mostly been driven out of Iraq by the 1950s, so Christians and Jews did not get quotas). According to the Iraqis interviewed, they wouldn’t have started killing each other if the Americans hadn’t put race and religious sect front and center.

The interviewees end up very pessimistic about forcing democracy on a country that does not have the civil institutions of the U.S. They learn that it isn’t enough to hold elections.

Aside from making us depressed about how we spent $1 trillion over the last few years, does the book have any value? Our involvement in Iraq is winding down, the hated King Bush II and his incompetent lackeys have been driven out of Washington, and we’ll never get the money back. I think the book is valuable and relevant to our present situation because it shows what happens when the U.S. government tries to solve a big problem quickly. The president delegates the challenge to some trusted advisors. They pick enthusiastic young party-loyal folks drawn from Congressional staff, think-tanks, and lobbying firms, to execute a grand plan. There is a lot of ideology at the top and little in the way of a feedback mechanism to know if the plan is working. Between the TARP bonfire and the stimulus plan currently working its way through Congress we are preparing to spend $1.5 trillion of our children’s money in a terrible hurry. There is little reason to believe that it will go better than our attempt to rebuild Iraq in America’s image. That’s my pitch for reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.