Chronicle of US chaos in Iraq wins Å“30,000 non-fiction prize
by John Ezard
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Rajiv Chandrasekaran
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 A book chronicling the chaos and cronyism that characterised the
US-led Coalition Provisional Authority's government of Iraq swept to
victory in the Å“30,000 Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize .
Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, says that
more than $1.6bn (Å“800m) of Iraq's oil revenue was paid to the US
vice-president Dick Cheney's old firm Halliburton; that the Baghdad
stock exchange was put in the hands of a 24-year-old who had never
worked in finance; and that the Iraqi capital's new traffic regulations
were based on the laws of the state of Maryland, downloaded from the
internet.
These are among hundreds of allegations based on interviews,
documents and case studies which led the judges to salute
Chandrasekaran's book as "up there with the greatest reportage of the
last 50 years" at an awards ceremony in London. The chair of the judges,
Lady Helena Kennedy QC, said it was "as fine as Hershey on Hiroshima and
Capote's In Cold Blood".
She added: "The writing is cool, exact and never overstated and in
many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American
action is revealed. Chandrasekaran stands back, detached and collected,
from his subject but his reader is left gobsmacked, right in the
middle."
The author - a former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief - sets his
narrative mostly inside the Green Zone, the heavily guarded Baghdad
sector inside which the US governed Iraq for the first year after
Saddam's downfall.
The runner-up for the award - which is never officially revealed - is
thought to have been Daughter of the Desert, by Georgina Howell, which
also has an Iraqi connection. It is a biography of the archaeologist,
spy, Arab linguist, mountaineer and poet Gertrude Bell, who helped king
Faisal draw the borders of the fledgling state of Iraq.
The other judges were scientist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili;
writer and editor Diana Athill; historian and journalist Tristram Hunt;
and broadcaster and journalist Mark Lawson.
The other books on the shortlist were: Murder in Amsterdam, by Ian
Buruma; Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties, by Peter Hennessy;
Brainwash, by Dominic Streatfeild; and The Verneys, by Adrian Tinniswood.
The guardian
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