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.
No one at the PRT knew what to do with the books – and even in 2008, books about America, American literature and our democratic form of government did not supplant the still basic need for potable water, functioning sewage systems, garbage pick up and electricity. Things the PRTs had installed for themselves and the Iraqis had had prior to 2003 - but no more.
How to Deal with hostile media: simple, buy your own newspaper
Then there’s Van Buren’s description of the Army’s approach to dealing with hostile media: the can-do anything anywhere any time US Army had “paid for and distributed its own newspaper The Baghdad News for years despite its having a readership of near zero.”
Soldiers were tasked with handing out copies while on patrol. Costs continued to accumulate. Meanwhile, Van Buren’s PRT “paid local lawyers to write articles for the area newspaper promoting a free press without disclosing that the writers were funded by the United States.”
This US military’s PSYOPS or “strategic communication” approach to the media meshes all too well with the Pentagon’s forays into similar contracting out to US companies (the Lincoln Group, SAIC, the Rendon Group, SY Coleman Inc to name the principals at the time) during, at least, the early years after the invasion to do the very same sort of thing. This despite their total lack of expertise and competency.
Although one young employee told me confidently that her company did (sic) public diplomacy for the US military in Iraq. After she described the character of the contracts, I explained that to be considered public diplomacy the information needed to be truthful and its source identifiable and that as a consequence, her company was not doing public diplomacy for the US government but was being paid to do PSYOPS or psychological operations for the Pentagon - something normally done by militaries in warzones.
Never mind, of course, that at the very same time, USAID was training Iraqi journalists to be journalists in the best sense of the word not to become covert operations specialists there to do the US or anyone else’s bidding.
What went right on Van Buren's watch? Anything? And why did State screw up yet again?
You may be asking if anything did go right during Van Buren’s shift and how did the State Department ever allow such a critical book to get published. First, Van Buren did describe a low cost 4-H project designed and implemented by a 50 year old woman named Dairy Carey who had considerable expertise in agriculture and the project accomplished what it should have if not more. As for the State Department – well one has to chalk Van Buren’s book’s publication up to yet another State snafu.
Here’s apparently what happened. According to the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) which defines the procedures for – among many other things – prepublication approval, the Bureau – in this case Public Affairs – was required to respond to Van Buren’s publication review request within 30 days. That should have happened in early fall of 2010. It didn't. Apparently tired of waiting for a response by spring 2011, Van Buren finally went ahead and published his book.
As it turns out, Van Buren had previously worked in the Bureau of Public Affairs - assigned there because in the lead up to the 2007 passport issuance fiasco when he was working in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, he had warned Maura Harty, then the Bureau’s Assistant Secretary, that the Bureau needed far more staff to be able to handle the projected surge in passport demand as a result of the post 9/11 tightened regulations.
Harty, true to character, apparently knew better than Van Buren and didn’t take kindly to his or anyone else’s warnings. According to Diplopundit who has been following the Van Buren book publication story assiduously, Van Buren was summarily transferred elsewhere in the State Department which is how he wound up in Public Affairs.
In early May 2007, I had also warned Harty of the impending trainwreck that I saw coming down the tracks as a result of the surge of hits and irate comments we were receiving daily on WV posts about passport issuance delays. But after all, I was only a retired FSO and a blogger who had been writing about the problem since January – so what credence did I have in the ethereal world of Consular Affairs?
The story had yet to be picked up by the mainstream media but this happened shortly thereafter as did singularly embarrassing Congressional hearings for the Department that were shown live on C-Span. Within months Ms. Harty had retired - far earlier than she had planned.
So, in a sense, Van Buren lucked out.
He used the knowledge gained from his Public Affairs stint well in helping publish and promote this book.
But then, maybe his primary fault was honesty - seemingly a problem for advancement in the State Department, a tiny department that has taken on far more than it can handle given its administrative inadequacies, bureaucratic overreach, paucity of funds as well as its questionable handling of programs and lack of experienced staff as a result of years of neglect.
Meanwhile, We Meant Well is an important book. As unpalatable as it may be to some folk especially those at the higher echelons of this overly hierarchical organization, Van Buren's message needs to be factored in to whatever ongoing discussion there is about PRTs in both Iraq and Afghanistan rather than studiously ignoring or perhaps even shunning the messenger. Van Buren, after all, has rightly called a spade a spade before.
Seems to me he should be recommended for promotion and a superior honor award. But then, what do I know.