The following is excerpted from We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren. Read an interview with Peter Van Buren about the book here. By Peter Van Buren
21 September 2011 Help Wanted, No Experience Necessary The reconstruction of Iraq was the largest nation-building program in history, dwarfing in cost, size, and complexity even those undertaken after World War II to rebuild Germany and Japan. At a cost to the US taxpayer of over $63 billion and counting, the plan was lavishly funded, yet, as government inspectors found, the efforts were characterized from the beginning by pervasive waste and inefficiency, mistaken judgments, flawed policies, and structural weaknesses. Of those thousands of acts of waste and hundreds of mistaken judgments, some portion was made by me and the two reconstruction teams I led in Iraq, along with my goodwilled but overwhelmed and unprepared colleagues in the State Department, the military, and dozens of other US government agencies. We were the ones who famously helped paste together feathers year after year, hoping for a duck. The scholarly history someone will one day write about Iraq and reconstruction will need the raw material of failure, and so this war story will try to explain how it all went so wrong. As a longtime Foreign Service Officer (FSO), I was sent by the Department of State to Iraq for one year in 2009 as part of the civilian Surge deployed to backstop the manlier military one. Along with a half dozen contractors as teammates, I was assigned to rebuild Iraq’s essential services, to supply water and sewer access as part of a counterinsurgency struggle to win over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. It was Vietnam, only better this time around, more T. E. Lawrence than Alden Pyle. I was to create projects that would lift the local economy and lure young men away from the dead-end opportunities of al Qaeda. I was also to empower women, turning them into entrepreneurs and handing them a future instead of a suicide vest. A robust consumer society would do the trick, shopping bags of affirmation leading to democracy. Executing all this happiness required me to live with the Army as part of an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (ePRT) on a Forward Operating Base (FOB, rhymes with “cob”). I spent the first six months on FOB Hammer in the desert halfway between Baghdad and Iran before moving to FOB Falcon just south of Baghdad for another half a year. In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, the United States established massive military bases throughout Iraq. Some, like the grows-like-crabgrass Victory Base (the military has little sense of irony), were as big as cities, with thousands of personnel, a Burger King, samba clubs, Turkish hookah bars, and swimming pools. Some were much smaller, such as FOBs Hammer and Falcon, with a couple of hundred soldiers each, Army food, and portable latrines. My work with the ePRTs involved traveling off the FOBs to commute to the war. Unlike so-called fobbits, who spent most of their tour on base, I spent a lot of time outside the wire. I was to meet with Iraqis, hand them money for the projects we hoped would spring up, and then assess the results of our spending. Despite endless applications of money and violence prior to my arrival, the United States had failed to pacify Iraq, undertaking projects and holding elections in an endless loop of turning points and imagined progress. “Fuck ’em and feed ’em” was the cynical way it was referred to in Vietnam, dropping bombs at night on an area where we dropped food during the daylight hours, destroying history after dark and reconstructing it by day. In Iraq my predecessors evolved nicer ways of describing what we were trying to do, such as “counterinsurgency” or “civil capacity building.” Regardless of the label, the one constant was that I could travel nowhere without an armored vehicle and armed soldiers for protection. Some of the soldiers on the FOB drove us around and pulled security for my team and me. The soldiers didn’t seem to mind the task, as it was easy duty, albeit a bit boring, the day-to-day of imperial policing. We spent hours stuck in armored vehicles, a tedium that made golf seem like a contact sport, shared the futility of reconstructing things while they were still falling apart, and became close to one another in the intense but temporary way of relationships formed in war, like twelve months of one-night stands. […]
