A couple of months ago, the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekharan promoted his Iraq book Imperial Life in the Emerald City on Fareed Zakaria’s show, Foreign Exchange:

… more than half the people who came to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority had to apply for their very first passport to go to Baghdad. So we’re not talking about citizens of the world here, we’re talking about people who were neophytes…

… billions of dollars [were] being disbursed without proper procedures… this contractor had no previous experience guarding… any facility, had never won a federal contract before… ‘Come to the palace and bring a duffel bag’… they found this man at his desk with $2M in brand-new shrinkwrapped $100 bills… ‘Put that money in the duffel bag and take it, that’s your startup fee.’

… now there are mini-Green Zones in there. The palace has its own [ring] of walls and barbed wire and security… [It’s] not just that America’s diplomats… are cloistered… but so are Iraq’s new leaders. Because… most of those ministers live in the Green Zone… they’re just as cut off from the people they’re supposed to be governing.