By Patricia H. Kushlis
A few weeks ago an active duty 23 year veteran of the Foreign Service named Peter Van Buren who served on two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq between 2008-9 published a book that described his experiences and put forth his views about the impact those teams had on Iraqis in the central region where he worked.
The book’s title: We meant well: how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people in essence says it all. For those of us old enough to remember Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 which chronicled the absurdities of US military life during World War II or read Lawrence Durrell’s Stiff Upper Lip and Esprit de Corps – hilarious and more innocuous tales based on Durrell’s work as press attaché at the British Embassy in Belgrade at the end of that same war - Van Buren’s We Meant Well should be seen in a similar vein.
It too is hilarious, horrifying and heart-wrenching – although Durrell’s books are less about the horror and more about the idiocies of life in a British diplomatic Balkan backwater in a politically torn and desparately poor country struggling to recuperate from a war and occupation not of its making.
We Meant Well is well written and biting satire.
It is brutally honest - although names have been changed to protect the innocent and not so innocent. Its goal is not to curry favor or plump for yet another trip into the war zone embedded with the troops or a lucrative short term contract to bring American values, chicken-cultivation, or plumbing to Iraq.
Rather it was written as a wake up call with the hope that Americans will start to understand the ways their hard earned taxpayer dollars have been all too cavalierly tossed around on projects of questionable utility in post-invasion Iraq. Projects that were designed and implemented by Americans too often ill-equipped for the job and assigned to well protected fortresses constructed by the US military for its own troops sent there for a grand total of six months to one year at a time and governed by the metrics they have been required to employ.
According to Van Buren, these metrics, such as they are, necessitated the spending of as much money as possible (tell that to our welfare recipients, State Department and USAID officers assigned to non-war zones or non-priority countries, or the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators) in as short a time as possible.
It’s like Vietnam CORDS all over again: a war fought not as a single war but as eight different ones each a year’s duration. This is about as far from post World War II Western Europe as one can get when and where US troops really were greeted with flowers and showered with kisses.
The inevitable rebuttal
A stinging rebuttal of Van Buren’s book appeared in the October 5 FP Flashpoints by Stephen Donnelly, a former contractor who had been assigned as a senior civilian urban planning officer. Donnelly claims that he and his PRT accomplished so much more during the same time period as that of the hapless State Department employee Van Buren. Maybe so or not. It would certainly be nice to think so.
But face it, Donnelly who tells us his specialty is urban planning (FP describes him as a certified planning consultant who lives in Maryland), was based in Salah ad-Din north of Baghdad near Tikrit. Van Buren was in the south.
The good news is that Donnelly was hired for his expertise. It’s people like Donnelly who possess the requisite credentials who should be working in Iraq - if any American advisors should be there at all. It’s unfortunate, however, that he also didn’t speak Arabic so he could have heard for himself what the Iraqis were saying to his face and behind his back.
Had this been Vietnam, Donnelly would likely have been a USAID employee assigned to CORDS at less than half the price to the American government. Maybe he would have received language training to boot. Nevertheless, he was not a diplomat like Van Buren who was trained to adjudicate visa requests (and sniff out fraud on the part of applicants) as well as help Americans abroad in distress.
Donnelly was also not a member of the US military skilled at fighting wars but also ducks out of water in the area of civil reconstruction. I still remember when the US military sneered at taking on police duty in the Balkans during the Clinton Administration – arguing that they didn’t do peacekeeping.
Van Buren's stories of public diplomacy funds wasted and PSYOPs gone wrong
Let me not regurgitate either of Van Buren’s or Donnelly’s stories however – or actually mostly Van Buren’s stories because - Donnelly’s emotionally charged rebuttal is, as an article not a book, shorter on specifics. Nevertheless, far better to read Van Buren’s book and Donnelly’s response yourself.
I do know, however, that Van Buren’s tales of public diplomacy wasted and PSYOPs gone wrong fit like the tightest of gloves with the reports I’ve read and heard elsewhere ever since US foreign policy in the Middle East went awry beginning in March 2003.
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