In the belly of the beast

What makes this one different is the fact that the author had unprecedented access to the Green Zone, where US imperial bureaucrats live and work, most of them rarely daring to step outside to see what was going on in their satrapy.

Chandrasekaran is no Michael Moore. He has bought into the ethos of the US project, which is what makes his analysis of the in-fighting and self-serving of his subjects all the more telling.

He writes scathingly of the failure of the privatisation of Iraq's state-owned enterprises.

It's not that he's opposed to privatisation - he has a conventional capitalist disregard for food subsidies and such "socialistic" inefficiencies. But the subjects of his scorn are the dreamers who think that you can unravel a command economy overnight.

He has a journalist's eye and ear from the telling personal detail, fleshing out the monsters in his dramatis personae so that they become believably inhuman.

He portrays the disasters that they perpetrate as a series of avoidable tragedies, but he never once considers that this chaos is, in reality, an essential part of the Bush game plan.

KARL DALLAS