The Complete Idiot's Guide to Fucking Up a Country

I have to recommend a great book - Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. It details the first year of the American occupation under Iraq, the "Emerald City" being the Green Zone around Saddam's Republican Palace where the Coalition Provisional Authority administered Iraq. Reading it, emotions veered from anger to outright shock. Where they trying to fail? I was completely against the invasion from the outset (writing my Junior Research Paper on how Iraq did not pose a threat and we should not invade in fall 2002 - apparently a midwestern high schooler has better sources than the CIA) but the glaring mistakes are so fucking egregious:

A skeleton staff was selected to run the Iraqi administration once in American hands. A man without tade experience ran the Trade Ministry. An engineer from the Army Corps of Engineers was put in charge of the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, the Ministry of Housing and Construction, Ministry of Irrigation, and Ministry of Electricity AND Ministry of Health. One man. Why? The planners assumed "Iraqi civil servants would return to work and ministries would run themselves" (32). YET, the CPA also decided on de-Ba'athification, effectively barring senoir civil servants, teachers, and most Iraqis who knew fucking anything about anything in Iraq.

The CPA decided to not only democratize Iraq but change the economy into a Chicago School free market wet dream. They wanted to privatize and dismantle central control similar to post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Leaving aside the contentious issue that selling off a nation's assets while occupying it is illegal, they also did not assign shit to this all-important convergence of neocon and neolib interests. The Germans had 8 thousand people work on the privitzation of East German state factories. The Americans assigned 3 people to this job in Iraq

I could go on, but fuck, there's just too much. If Iraq was to be Bush's jewel in the neocon crown why the fuck did he devote so little people to it? I don't buy the argument of some who supported the war, but now try to distance themselves from the burning carcass Iraq has become by claiming that if not for these mistakes it all would have gone swell. It was going to be horrible, but it could have been less horrible.

Check out the book if only for the surreal discriptions of life in the green zone: staffers chasing cooze and trying to fuck in any secluded space available, Halliburton hunting down and exterminating kitty kats with extreme prejudice, a man who, in order to get his site guarded, had to venture outside the Green Zone for a full-length mirror in which CPA men could look at the asses of the chicks they fucked. Christ on earth, it's almost unbelievable.

Of course, learning about the irreparable mistakes of the first year of occupation cannot change anything, But should you ever want to know how to really and truly fuck a country up, this is a great guide.