Free To Be a Friend Is Fatal by Kirk W. Johnson

reach agreement through building consensus.”
    It didn’t take long for the distaste of the work to settle in; to realize that I was the person in charge of churning out little scraps of propaganda with tenuous ties to reality. It was enough, though, for the believers in the mission. Appreciative emails from recipients, mostly neoconservatives back in the United States, flooded in shortly after I sent out each day’s IDU . “Why doesn’t the liberal media ever cover this ?! Not bloody enough for them?” they exclaimed, not recognizing that they were reading a “success story” about training on sprinkler systems that had been repackaged from a year earlier.
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    A week into my new job, I knocked on the door of the Education Sector trailer in search of a good news story for the IDU . A bespectacled young Iraqi with a soft smile stood up and extended his hand and said, “Hi, my name is Yaghdan.”

5.
Raise High the Blast Walls
    Chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man . . .
    â€”Henry Adams
    T he Americans cared for the Green Zone like a prisoner tidies his cell. As the insurgency gathered force throughout 2005, the true enemy was not some inchoate militia but unpredictability. And so we did our best to make things predictable. We hired fleets of Iraqis to banish the dust each morning from our tiles, sheets, windows, and toilets, and then once again in the afternoon. Pizza Express and Burger King served up grease and cheese to absorb the hangover from the previous night. We hired a French chef who emailed the cafeteria menu each morning: potage Saint-Germain, grilled steak with herbs, batter-fried sole fillet, gratin potato dauphinoise. Iraqi chauffeurs drove us to and from the Bunker Bar, where the bartender was required to ask if you were packing before he poured. The embassy ran three-on-three basketball tournaments in the parking lot behind the palace and announced theme days to boost morale. This Friday: Talk Like a Pirate Day!
    But every now and then, the war on the other side of the concrete would open its maw and spew forth some aged mortars or indirect AK-47 rounds and ruin a perfectly good party. So the blast walls grew taller, the parties moved indoors, and the checkpoints multiplied. We paid exorbitant sums to a security firm to produce a daily Safe Report , which lassoed the horrors outside—severed limbs, demolished convoys, explodedmarketplaces—into neat charts analyzing thirty-day trend lines and forty-eight-hour “activity levels.” We learned that “the number of incidents in Baghdad yesterday fell slightly (from 15 to 14). There were only three VBIEDs, vehicle-borne IEDs, compared to four the day before. Yesterday’s activity accounted for 18% of the Iraq total (from 17% the day before).” We nodded knowingly, but we secretly knew nothing.
    My friends and I found ways to make the Green Zone our own. Late at night on March 15, the eve of the first session of Iraq’s Transitional National Assembly—the precursor to its first parliament—several friends and I piled into a USAID van and headed over to the convention center on the edge of the Green Zone. I had heard rumors of a Steinway concert grand piano in the assembly hall where the TNA would meet, but my previous attempts to get in had been stymied by overzealous Gurkhas guarding the entrance. This time, though, I slipped a twenty into the guard’s palm, and he ushered us in. Inside, Iraqis were at work hanging a massive banner over the stage emblazoned with an excerpt from the Quran that extolled the virtues of consultation and cooperation. They shrugged when I asked nervously if I could play the piano, which was hiding behind the main stage curtain. My friends piled into the front-row seats designated for the prime minister and the president while I worked through blues and boogie standards by Fats Waller and Albert Ammons. On the way back to the