Disentangling the confusion ... a mass of electrical wires in front of Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad's al-Adhamiyah district. Photograph: Patrick Baz/AFP
Five years ago this week, in a house outside Winchester, I sat down to a meal with old friends. Afterwards we slumped on a large couch, switched to CNN and watched 36 Tomahawk missiles and two GBU-17 bombs flattening swathes of central Baghdad. It was the beginning of the Iraq War, a thoroughly depressing night, and the beginning of a lengthy process of bloodshed, protest and debate that still continues today.
It's possible to get very lost very fast in media coverage of the war: in the profusion of websites, newsprint, footage and photographs which chart, from pro and anti positions, the insurgency, the civil war, the financial and moral cost, and the situation's short and longer-term effects.
Hundreds of books have already been written on the subject. An early favourite of mine, providing ammunition for scores of arguments, was William Rivers Pitt's War on Iraq. This offered a short summary of the country's recent history and a 70-page Q and A with UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who persuasively ran through why someone would have to be either stupid or the leader of the free world, or maybe both, to believe that Saddam's regime was stockpiling WMD.
This, alongside Noam Chomsky's 9-11, which hit bookshops less than two months after the attack on the World Trade Centre, harked back to the bygone era of political pamphlets being speedily produced to sway opinion on controversial subjects. What's interesting now, on the war's fifth anniversary, is that writers have begun to exploit the advantages of hindsight. Useful as records, respectively, of one stripe of expert opinion on the case for war and an immediate socialist libertarian response to a terrorist atrocity, both Pitt's and Chomsky's books were essentially ephemeral.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, on the other hand, is a book that will probably be read for many years to come. It certainly deserves to be, whether as an historical document of the Coalition Provisional Authority's reign over Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004, an indictment of the neoconservative project's defining action, or simply as an analysis of that perpetual spoiler, hubris.
Chandrasekaran, an assistant editor of the Washington Post, lived in Baghdad from the end of 2002 until September 2004. His immensely readable book, a work of scrupulously sourced reportage, uncovers staggering levels of incompetence, opportunism and utter disregard for (Iraqi) human life at the heart of the Bush administration.
Planning for post-war governance got underway just a few months before the invasion, and the office charged with the task - the Pythonesque Office for Special Plans - only dared present the best-case scenario (jubilant Iraqis welcome Coalition forces with open arms, embrace western-style democracy and free market capitalism, live happily ever after), as their Pentagon superiors had no interest in considering other possibilities.
Discounting the grotesque immorality of Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neocon lackeys, even those who genuinely believed in rebuilding Iraq were hopelessly out of step with reality. Within the Emerald City well-intentioned US legislators and technocrats wrote a new national traffic code, revamped Iraqi patent law and designed Saddam-free banknotes. Beyond the razor wire and Hesco barriers that ringed the Green Zone, the power was on for just nine hours out of 24, water was undrinkable, schools lacked desks and textbooks, the civilian death count was swelling every day, and hospitals had been stripped of equipment.
"I heard Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, say that Iraq's hospitals would be fine if the Iraqis just washed their hands and cleaned the crap off the walls." So reads one of the 200-plus paragraphs that make up Eliot Weinberger's What I Heard About Iraq. It's an unabashedly polemical work, first printed in the London Review of Books, that filters quotations and news reports into a sickening record of brutality, political immorality and rank ignorance.
Unclassifiable in terms of style, What I Heard About Iraq is reminiscent of the Novels in Three Lines of Felix Feneon, albeit much less elliptical in effect. If Chandrasekaran's book makes you shake your head in disbelief, Weinberger's tempts you to stick it in the oven:
"I heard Richard Perle tell Americans to 'relax and celebrate victory.' I heard him say: 'The predictions of those who opposed this war can be discarded like spent cartridges.'
"I heard an Iraqi man say: 'I swear I saw dogs eating the body of a woman.'
"I heard the president's mother say: 'Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?'"
And on and on it goes. It's a horrible book that provokes only unpleasant emotions, and I urge anyone who hasn't to get a copy and read it.
The Iraq war is filtering into novels, too, although writers of fiction seem so coy to address it head on that it is doubtful whether it will ever inspire its own Life and Fate or The Naked and the Dead. One interesting take on the climate of fear generated by the "war on terror" is James Miller's Lost Boys, which will be published in July. An unlikely fusion of JM Barrie and Lovecraft, it's not an entirely successful novel, but it represents a fascinating sign as to how the current geopolitical situation, which preceded but is now largely defined by the Iraq War, will be seeping into literature for many years to come.
