Baghdad Central

But the more Khafaji works for the Americans, the more he understands that he can also work for himself and for those whom he loves. By following the twisting and twisted trail of money and sex in the novel, the reader begins to understand that neither the collaborator nor the culture of collaboration is something that can be readily controlled.

On the one hand, there is nothing radical, or radically new about this. It is not just postcolonial critics who insist that native informants maintain at least some of their agency. Intelligence officers also know this well, and handlers are trained to recognize and minimize the ways in which their positions can be undercut by their operatives. On the other hand, however, the novel exposes something else, perhaps even more profound.

While people tend to think that information gathering lies at the heart of the collaboration strategy, occupation regimes benefit just as much if not more from the culture of deception that it engenders and the way this culture corrodes the occupied society. Neighbors learn to distrust one another precisely because they know that anyone could be an informant. Activist and militant networks break down once the poison of collaboration has been injected into their body. I know this, having heard endless stories from Palestinian friends in the Occupied Territories. The resulting social disintegration is the kind favored by occupation forces-a divided society is one that has trouble resisting. But, at the same time, a fragmented society can also be an unruly one.

Baghdad Central describes this breakdown in detail, as it does the rise of competing networks, such as those of the Shiite militias. More than this though, because it uses the noir genre to explore how the culture of deception is one that necessarily infects everyone, it is difficult to put the book down.

Khafaji's handlers lie to him, and he returns the favor. Neighbors and strangers lie to one another. But the lie is not something that is deployed solely outside the confines of the Green Zone. Once the deception starts, the lies proliferate and fold back on one another. There is no antidote. It is in this aspect of intelligence work in military occupation-its complete reliance on deception and its completely corrosive effects on the occupied as well as the occupier -that Baghdad Central shows its fangs, since it underscores an unspoken shortcoming of General David Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine.

Petraeus is commonly accredited with introducing a shift in the strategy of military rule in Iraq. Instead of squashing the enemy directly, he maintained that counterinsurgency needs to integrate humanitarian means into warfare, which includes working with the local population. Colleen Bell from the University of Saskatchewan describes this as a form of hybrid warfare that simultaneously enacts targeted killing while making the population ''live.'' She shows how, according to the Petraeus school, insurgency is characterized as "a virus or bacteria that plagues the social body, whose immune system is already compromised." Accordingly, counterinsurgency needs to heal the disease through targeted violence, while working to coopt the rest of the body; i.e., the population. Both the violence and the pacification depend on collaborators.

While critics of different stripes have commented on the shortcomings of Petraeus's approach, to the best of my knowledge no one has discussed what this strategy has done to the US military as an occupying force. Wittingly or unwittingly, Colla's novel begins to reveal how this form of counterinsurgency can rebound. Yes, the corpses belong mostly to the occupied Iraqis. Yes, Iraqis were the victims of this prolonged invasion and counterinsurgency tactics. But in the end, the deceptive and corrosive nature of military occupation also makes the US military vulnerable.

To put it simply, the goal was to produce a network of collaborators. This network was created mostly by inexperienced agents who bought-using different means-the services of Iraqis. Colla shows that when the official policy is one of corrupting and there is no robust firewall to prevent it from recoiling, the agents may end up paying operatives, who end up betraying and killing Americans. To use the same medical metaphor Petraeus's cronies deployed when describing the fight against insurgents, collaboration is like a contagious virus that ends up also infecting the occupier. The handlers become the handled.

Precisely because Colla's book reveals very dark sides of occupation, not only readers interested in political thrillers will be attracted to what Baghdad Central has to say – government officials and secret agents will also be unable to put these books down. Even though Colla provides a relentless critique, he also offers a fascinating and intimate look at the inner workings of military occupation.