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We Meant Well
Paperback
Series: American Empire Project
General Middle Eastern HistoryInternational RelationsIraq War (2003-2011)
Publisher Price: $27.99
ISBN13: 9780805096811
Publisher: St Martins Pr 3Pl
Published: Aug 21 2012
Pages: 269
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.77 Width: 5.57 Depth: 8.26
Language: English
One diplomat's darkly humorous and ultimately scathing assault on just about everything the military and State Department have done--or tried to do--since the invasion of Iraq. The title says it all.--The New York Times
Charged with rebuilding Iraq, would you spend taxpayer money on a sports mural in Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhood to promote reconciliation through art? How about an isolated milk factory that cannot get its milk to market? Or a pastry class training women to open cafés on bombed-out streets that lack water and electricity?
As Peter Van Buren shows, we bought all these projects and more in the most expensive hearts-and-minds campaign since the Marshall Plan. We Meant Well is his eyewitness account of the civilian side of the surge--that surreal and bollixed attempt to defeat terrorism and win over Iraqis by reconstructing the world we had just destroyed. Leading a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team on its quixotic mission, Van Buren details, with laser-like irony, his yearlong encounter with pointless projects, bureaucratic fumbling, overwhelmed soldiers, and oblivious administrators secluded in the world's largest embassy, who fail to realize that you can't rebuild a country without first picking up the trash.
A work of scathing, gallows humor (The Boston Globe), We Meant Well is a tragicomic voyage of ineptitude and corruption that leaves its writer--and readers--appalled and disillusioned, but wiser.
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