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We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (American Empire Project), by Peter Van Buren

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Review

“One diplomat's darkly humorous and ultimately scathing assault on just about everything the military and the State Department have done -- or tried to do -- since the invasion of Iraq. The title says it all.” ―Steven Myers, New York Times“In this shocking and darkly hilarious exposé of the reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq, former State Department team leader Van Buren describes the tragicomedy that has been American efforts at nation building, marked by bizarre decisions and wrongheaded priorities… "We made things in Iraq look the way we wanted them to look," Van Buren writes. With lyrical prose and biting wit, this book reveals the devastating arrogance of imperial ambition and folly.” ―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)“One of the rare, completely satisfying results of the expensive debacle in Iraq.” ―Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)“I've read just about every memoir out of Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade, military or otherwise, and this stands as one of the best -- certainly one of the most self-aware and best written.” ―Washingtonian“Long after the self-serving memoirs of people named Bush, Rice, and Rumsfeld are consigned to some landfill, this unsparing and very funny chronicle will remain on the short list of books essential to understanding America's Iraq War. Here is nation-building as it looks from the inside--waste, folly, and sheer silliness included.” ―Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War“The road to Hell is paved with taxpayer dollars in Peter Van Buren's account of a misspent year rebuilding Iraq. Abrasive, honest and funny, We Meant Well is an insider's account of life behind blast walls at the height of the surge.” ―Nathan Hodge, author of Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders“If Joseph Heller's war began in 2004 instead of 1944, this would be the book entitled Catch-22. Once I picked up We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (available September 27), I could not put the book down. I could not believe so much that appears to be fictional satire could instead relate actual events...Very highly recommended.” ―Seattle-Post Intelligencer“We Meant Well is a must-read, first-hand account of our disastrous occupation of Iraq. Its lively writing style will appeal to a wide audience.” ―Ron Paul, M.D., Member of Congress

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About the Author

Peter Van Buren has served with the Foreign Service for over 23 years. He received a Meritorious Honor Award for assistance to Americans following the Hanshin earthquake in Kobe, a Superior Honor Award for helping an American rape victim in Japan, and another award for work in the tsunami relief efforts in Thailand. Previous assignments include Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the UK and Hong Kong. He volunteered for Iraq service and was assigned to ePRT duty 2009-10. His tour extended past the withdrawal of the last combat troops.Van Buren worked extensively with the military while overseeing evacuation planning in Japan and Korea. This experience included multiple field exercises, plus civil-military work in Seoul, Tokyo, Hawaii, and Sydney with allies from the UK, Australia, and elsewhere. The Marine Corps selected Van Buren to travel to Camp Lejeune in 2006 to participate in a field exercise that included simulated Iraqi conditions. Van Buren spent a year on the Hill in the Department of State's Congressional Liaison Office.Van Buren speaks Japanese, Chinese Mandarin, and some Korean. Born in New York City, he lives in Virginia with his spouse, two daughters, and a docile Rottweiler. We Meant Well is his first book.

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Product details

Series: American Empire Project

Paperback: 288 pages

Publisher: Metropolitan Books; First edition (August 21, 2012)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0805096817

ISBN-13: 978-0805096811

Product Dimensions:

5.5 x 0.8 x 8.1 inches

Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.6 out of 5 stars

133 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#361,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I gather that Van Buren is persona non grata at State, now -- not entirely because of this book, but it cannot but have played a role in his departure. Mind you, it hardly sounds as though he's eager to stay. There are dispiriting scenes of Embassy and Green Zone isolation and delusion, and of the consistently short-sighted changing winds of fashionable 'rebuilding' policy. As Richard Cheney said back in the days when he opposed the invasion of Iraq (before he became the war-hungry VP, Dick Cheney), "you break it, you bought it." Van Buren's target, as I see it, is not individual State Department personnel, despite the fact that they come off quite badly here. He includes himself in the critique, however, of a blinkered and know-nothing approach with impossible goals. And it's the goals -- policy set at the highest level of the then-US government -- that is in the firing line. Van Buren is notably generous to the soldiers and marines and others with military tasks to do; he shows, in fact, a degree of admiration for them doing impossible jobs in horrible circumstances. Anyway, if you want to know something about the underbelly of US policy aspirations, expressed at the level of press conferences and Presidential directives and back-slapping, but viewed from the mess and folly on the ground, you can't go wrong with this book. I would recommend, as a companion piece and useful complement, Dexter Filkins' The Forever War.

This is perhaps the best personal account I have read on what life was like outside the Green Zone for those of us on distant FOBs who weren't involved in the daily grind and dangers of direct combat, but instead were faced with other challenges and "opportunities." Mr. Van Buren's book is exceptionally well written, incisively accurate, wildly entertaining and witty, and full of first hand observations that brought back a lot of memories for me, mostly good. I had read that this book was the Catch 22 for the Iraq War, and while I can appreciate that comparison, this book is not satire - the descriptions are all spot-on. This alone makes the book stand out from the crowd of all other recent war tomes and sagas. Lastly, I would say that other than Rory Stewart's "Prince of the Marshes" that detailed similar experiences from much earlier in the war and during the CPA regime, Van Buren has not only accurately portrayed the challenges of dealing with formal and informal host nation "leaders," but has provided a window into our own U.S. "whole of government" eccentricities and fiefdoms. I would recommend this book to any reader, but particularly to those young people just starting or considering a career in government service, in or out of uniform.

A fascinating, cynical, very humorous, and highly enlightening perspective on what "we" did in Iraq once the bombs (mostly) stopped dropping. There are tales aplenty about graft, corruption, ignorance, and most of all incompetence in the ridiculous pursuit of transforming Iraq into a New Kansas in the wake of the invasion and occupation there. Particularly telling (to me) was the revelation that American soldiers couldn't be trusted to reliably guard a perimeter - that responsibility had to be outsourced to African mercenaries ("contractors"). Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were completely wasted on projects so absurd they would have been rejected even by HUD. The occupation authorities were so completely awash in funding they literally couldn't spend it fast enough, apparently - while in the meantime over 2,000 Americans were drowned by Hurricane Katrina because the government couldn't be bothered with properly maintaining the levees in Louisiana. Heads should have rolled by the hundreds... instead, Americans have been successfully distracted by our Telescreens such that the Neocons who got us in to this mess have skated away with their credibility intact, free to agitate for the next invasion against this year's "worse than Hitler" (at present, Iran).

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