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Book Review

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and

Minds of the Iraqi People

Peter Van Buren

Metropolitan Books, 2011

During World War II, journalist Ernie Pyleand cartoonist Bill Mauldin told the story of thewar to Americans as though through the eyes ofthe grunts who slogged through the mud andlived in the foxholes. We could call this a grunt-eyed view of a war. It isnt the same perspectiveas one would get from a distance. A detachedoverview reveals some truths, and they are to betaken seriously; but a view as seen by those whoexperienced the war at ground level brings its owntruths into focusand these, too, are worth takingseriously. Even though they may in part be thesame truths, they take on an enhanced reality byhaving been experienced directly.

Peter Van Buren doesnt quite fit the image

of a grunt. He was a veteran 23-year foreignservice officer in the U.S. State Department whenhe served a year in Iraq in 2009. But he did workat ground level amid the grime and the heat, firstat Forward Operating Base Hammer in themiddle of nowhere in the desert halfway

between Baghdad and Iran and then at ForwardOperating Base Falcon on the southern outskirtsof Baghdad. He shared the life and circumstances

of the troops with which he was embedded. By nomeans was his a comfortable sinecure situated inthe enormous Worlds Biggest Embassy in thecity, with its replication of the American homeenvironment.

Van Buren tells the story of the Americanattempts at the reconstruction of Iraq as he


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witnessed them out in the field. His narrativecarries him through his year there, withconsiderable commentary along the way. Anaspect of his account that adds to itsverisimilitude, albeit superficially, is his profaneway of telling the story. The book is full ofsarcasm, irony, hyperbole, honest description,well-crafted turns of phraseand scatologicalhumor. The last of these has caused somereviewers to think the book quite amusinglaugh out loudfunny. We, however, weresufficiently absorbed in the other qualities that theprofane language seemed more like anunnecessary and not particularly humorous

embellishment. This reviewer must admit,however, that he is a good many years from hisMarine Corps days, a time when that sort oflanguage was engrained in everything we gruntssaid.

Style aside, the value of the book lies in itssubstance. It is a description of what happenswhen a superpower goes into a country with onlythe most meager knowledge of that countrys

people and customs and seeks to do nationbuilding. The hubris and inanity of such aproject stands out on every page. The problemwasnt simply that the United States had nocomprehensive plan for how it wouldreconstruct Iraq, no organizational structureready, and thoroughly inadequate staffingthosethings were present, to be sure; but the problemwas deeper than that. It lay, we might conclude,in the very idea of nation building. This would be

so even if the purpose were to put the countryback where it was before the invasion (with, ofcourse, a change in government). Thepresumptuousness is compounded when the ideais to reconstitute the society into a mirror image ofthe superpower. (Van Buren says the overallpremise of the U.S. efforts [was] that the Iraqis


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want to be like us.) The fatuity of this is perfectlyillustrated by the objective of empoweringwomen, a feminist ideal that is held to in theUnited States but that declares a culture-war, ineffect, on so much that goes to the heart of Islamicreligion and culture.

The reports of the Special Inspector Generalfor Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) confirm muchthat Van Buren tells us, but the broader lessonabout nation buildingper se have passed him by,leaving the core premise of Americas globalmeliorism undisturbed. His reportHard Lessons:The Iraq Reconstruction Experience sums up thisway: that of the many lessons to be drawn from

Iraq reconstruction, the most compelling speak tothe need to develop an agreed-upon doctrine andstructure for contingency relief and reconstructionoperations to guide the use of military andeconomic power so that the United States is readywhen it next must intervene in a failed or failing

state [our emphasis]. In other words, Americansneed to be ready to go at it again. (Despite ourquarrel with that expectation, SIGIRsHard

Lessonsis well worth reading, with Van Burensbook as a valuable supplement.)

A project so immense is filtered through themyriad imperfections of ordinary humanity. Itseems that in the Iraq Reconstruction effort, littleattempt was made to minimize thoseimperfections. Van Buren shows what a slipshodprocess it was, despite (or mostly likely in partbecause of) the many billions of dollars pouredinto the effort. Along with idealism, hard workand sacrifice (which must be mentioned if we areproperly to appreciate what so many didcontribute), there is opportunism, careerism,indifference, failures of communication, short-termism, a love of hype, obliviousness to reality,bureaucratic make-believe, prodigality and


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corruption. We will see all of this illustrated aswe review the specifics Van Buren gives us.

Staffing. It seems an understatement to saythat the effort was fragmented and understaffed.

One of the Provisional Reconstruction Teamshad to serve a population the size of Detroit witha staff of six. The Foreign Service Officers weresupplemented with contracted workers, mostlyhired without interviews, whose mainqualification seemed to be an interest in living inIraq for a year with a $250,000 salary and three

paid vacations. Although few spoke Arabic, theState Department did not provide languagetraining. There was an incomprehensible

disconnect between their qualifications, so tospeak, and the jobs they were assigned. I hadamong my teammates a retired guy who wasimagined as our elections expert, a washed-out

juicer who slept late most days, and a formerArmy turret gunner who was hired to overseesewage and water programs Another teammatewas a former Army MP now in charge of small

business development Another two were

agriculturalists for real, albeit specializing in hogs(in a Muslim country). A Sergeant who fixedcars ended up overseeing a vocational school.This was exacerbated by constant turnover:There had already been seven team leaders for[my] group in the last twelve months before hisarrival.

An oddball aspect had to do with how muchthe United States was bringing in mercenariesfrom the Third World to do anything dirty, dark,or dangerous, such as cleaning latrines, diggingholes, unloading things, guarding places, orserving food. Exclusively young male workersimported from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, andother Third World garden spots did these jobs.The American military had always depended on a


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community of Filipinos to staff its bars and curioshops. The barbers at the Army base barbershopswere all from Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, importedinto Iraq by [an] unnamed subcontractor to workfor cheap.

Recently, the American people weresurprised to find that the United States had reliedon Libyan security personnel to guard its embassyin Benghazi against such attacks as occurred onSeptember 11, 2012. We find from Van Burensbook that that was by no means unusual: he refersto very young men from the slums of Ugandawho guarded most US military facilities in Iraq.He says that the Embassy used a different

contractor and so was guarded exclusively byPeruvians. That security at American embassiesis delegated in such a fashion is surprising to aformer Marine, since the guarding of theembassies has traditionally been a function of theMarine Corps.

Shifting and ill-defined purposes anddirection. The Foreign Service Officers receivedvery little training for their role, and one aspect of

it, Van Buren says, is that they never told usanything about what we were supposed to do oncewe got there. The SIGIR reports give some ideaof the thinking behind the constant changes indirection, but for an officer in the field such asVan Buren it seemed like there was an ever-changing mandate on what to do. He explainsthat one fiscal quarter the emphasis from theEmbassy would be on limited, immediate-impact

projects, while three months later wed be told toshift to long-term efforts. The impression wasone of extreme superficiality: Every[reconstruction team] went through fads andfashions in its year, holding womensempowerment conferences, paying for trashpickup, or giving away books and school


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supplies, all with little memory from year to yearabout what had been done before. Van Burenspeaks of the blind-leading-the-blind style ofmanagement that was more concerned aboutinconsequential aspects than about actual purpose:Instead of asking why a [reconstruction team]wanted to spend $22,000 to produce a stage playin Iraq, the committee asked why the playsdirector needed five production assistants. Hesays the review process substituted pettycorrections for any semblance of broader policyguidance.

Essentials were neglected: It took us yearsto realize we needed to think about things like

garbage and potable water. Money was pouredonto Iraqis with only the flimsiest hope thatsomething would come of it: We were asked togive out micro-grants, $5,000 in actual cash to anIraqi to open a business, no strings attached.Public relations fakery was held in high esteem:Visitors from the Embassy demand to meet realIraqis, but only under safe conditions, andpreferably ones who spoke English and would

pose for photos in robes and who could besummoned on short notice We were all requiredto have a few such Iraqi friends to keep our bosseshappy, and friends didnt come for free.

Anyone who has taught in an Americancollege of business will recognize the fatuoushocus-pocus that is virtually de rigueurinorganizations today: Every [reconstruction team]

produced a maturity model matrix, layers ofwork plans, progress modeling reports, missionstatements and the like. Owing to their length,complexity, and untethered-to-reality focus, thesereporting tools were useless for planning andquickly devolved into a list of chores to be done.He says, moreover, that within my own year inIraq, we switched progress models repeatedly.


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A result: countless boondoggles. Part ofwhat some see as the humor in the book comesfrom Van Burens account of the many dead-endprojects that either served no purpose or that werestarted and then abandoned. The book begins witha page that tells about $88,000 being spent on a

project called My Arabic Library whichfeatured American novels like Tom Sawyertranslated into Arabic. When the books were leftat an Iraqi school, the principal triedunsuccessfully to sell them on the black market,and wound up dumping them behind the school.We are told of a contract being let for a $680million water reconstruction project, but that

nothing was ever done. There was a sportsdiplomacy program under which hundreds ofsoccer balls were donated for Iraqis to play with.The problem was that no one would play with theballs, because they included the flag of SaudiArabia, which has a Koranic verse on it, and youcannot put your foot to a Koranic verse. A$200,000 center was set up to train women towork in a sewing factory, only to find that thewomen were unemployable because Chineseimports began arriving in Iraq. The effect was toturn unskilled, unemployed women intosemiskilled, unemployed women. $2.58 millionwas shelled out to create a poultry plant thatstayed idle because the chicken proved tooexpensive to compete with frozen chickenimported from Brazil. Van Buren muses that noone actually did any market research, and we areprompted to muse more broadly: Why was there

such ubiquitous incompetence? Have Americansfallen so low? These arent questions to be askedbut quickly forgotten.

Pallets of $100 bills; billions in waste.One thing we didnt lack was money A soldierrecalled unloading pallets of new US hundred-dollar bills, millions of dollars flushing out of the


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belly of a C-130 cargo aircraft to be picked up offthe runway by forklifts. This gives us a visualimage, at least, of the otherwise incomprehensiblesum of $63 billion spent overall onreconstruction. The money provided a metric forprogress: Individual military units were gradedon how much cash they spentmore money spentmeant more reconstruction kudos on evaluationreports. Cost was no object: We were notallowed to order things through the Internet.When we needed something not available in Iraq,such as veterinary supplies, we had to pay anintermediary to order it through the Internet, forwhich he charged a 30 percent fee (with another

100 percent markup for shipping and localcustoms costs, including bribes). This illustrateswhat Van Buren means when he says weoverpaid for everything, creating and then fuelinga vast market for corruption.

We are told that since the publication ofthis book, the Department of State has beguntermination proceedings against Van Buren. Itseasy to understand why they would not want

somebody working for them who is so disaffected.But lets hope (probably very unrealistically,considering the usual propensities of people insuch matters) that they will take seriously thecontent ofWe Meant Well. Whether they do ornot, it would be fascinating to read a detailedresponse addressing the many issues he has raised.

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