Imperial Life in the Emerald City Inside Iraq's Green Zone

This is the startling portrait of an Oz-like place where a vital aspect of our government's folly in Iraq played out. The Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, takes us with him into the Zone, into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America—a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, and a parking lot filled with shiny new SUV's—much of it run by Halliburton. Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and internal documents, Chandrasekaran tells the story of the people that inhabited the Green Zone during the occupation, from imperial viceroy L. Paul Bremer III to the fleet of twentysomethings hired to implement the idea that Americans could build a Jeffersonian democracy in the embattled Middle East.