The life of Reilly - Baghdad style

This week the Guardian is publishing extracts from Rajiv Chandrasekaran's new book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone. Based on today’s extract I suspect that I am going to want to rush out and buy it even though I know it will only make me more depressed. A few snippets from today:

• All foodstuffs, including the water in which they boil the hotdogs* and all fresh meat and vegetables, comes from contractors outside of Iraq. Breakfast cereal, in a nod to keeping America's greenhouse gas emissions at the top of the chart, is flown in from the States.
• The water in the swimming pool is a beautiful, clear blue.
• Halliburton's customer-service liaison is a spotty 22 year old man whose previous experience was as a junior aide to a Republican congressman. Halliburton hired him and then asked to see his CV.
• Paul Bremer's armed guards earned a cool quarter of a million USD per annum.
• Most staff leave the Green Zone only rarely if at all.
• Despite all of this luxury the coddled individuals living in this la-la land still feel the need to have a "combat stress clinic".

When asked about a recent suicide bomb attack by three separate bombers not far outside the walls of the enclave one of the staffers replied, apparently without irony:

"Yeah, I saw something about it on the office television...but I didn't watch the full report. I was too busy working on my democracy project."

* Note: do you think that the American embassy in Israel serves pork? I don't.