Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (2011) — a Serendipitously Good Companion to — Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War — a Book Review

28 January 2014

Peter Van Buren’s book illustrates the on-the-ground, bureaucratic absurdities (in Iraq) during the United States occupation

American Foreign Service Officer, Peter Van Buren’s book — We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People — addresses the apparently ineradicable bureaucratic nonsense that Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, attempted to correct in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Van Buren’s book stands on its own. But read with Secretary Gates’ memoir (reviewed here), readers get both a “flunky” and leader’s view of the same phenomenon.

I imagine the two men would agree in their negative assessment of how foolish bureaucracies negatively impacted the American effort during both occupations.

Significance — We Meant Well and Duty, taken together

Combined, the two volumes make a brilliantly strong argument against starting unwinnable wars.

And, for some readers, they persuasively present a philosophical argument against big government.

We Meant Well’s worth

Van Buren — who led two Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq for a year — combines a concise sense for the absurd with a poet’s equally abbreviated eye for humanity’s pain. Those two qualities flip back and forth, throughout.

The book has a few weaker chapters, but overall, it is a gem.

Van Buren’s thesis

American reconstruction policy in Iraq was based on:

abysmal cultural and infrastructural ignorance

astonishingly profligate money wasting — which further corrupted Iraqi society

and

an inability to think about the consequences of the glaringly obvious short-comings contained in equally short-sighted plans.

“Absurd” is the only word that captures the character of Van Buren’s numerous examples of these qualities in action.

Samples of bureaucratic absurdity

Many of Van Buren’s examples of planned, organized, and enforced stupidity build on themselves, so as to make quoting them too intricately long.

But there are shorter synopses. Here is one:

[T]rash pickup was the archetypal example of everything that wasn’t working with reconstruction.

“If the trash isn’t picked up soon,” said the Brigade Commander, “somebody will plant an IED in it and one of my boys will die. I’m going to pay people to pick up the trash now rather than wait for the Iraqi government.”

As long as the United States would pay for trash pickup, why should the municipality? Using Coalition cash rather than Iraqi institutions set back efforts to foster self-reliance.

Many small towns gave up lobbying the central government for money, knowing the Americans would pay for everything. Instead of encouraging growth and capacity of civic functions, our massive hemorrhaging of cash discouraged them.

Complicating matters further, the contractors we employed often distorted local labor markets. The USAID inspector general found wages paid for trash pickup by its Community Stabilization Program were higher than the average for even skilled laborers. It was more lucrative to be overpaid by the United States to pick up trash than it was to run a shop or fix cars. Possibly people went out and found more trash to throw around so that they could be paid by us to pick it up.

We overpaid for everything, creating and then fueling a vast market for corruption. It wasn’t so much that we were conned, it was as if we demanded to be cheated and would not take no for an answer.

A similar example is the $2.6 million (USD) chicken-processing plant that the Army built, despite the existence of a pre-existing USAID study that showed it would be grossly uneconomic, and no Iraqis would be able (or want) to afford its output. (See page 140, in the chapter entitled, Chicken Shit.)

Other projects, equally ridiculously undertaken, are listed in the chapter named, Everyone Was Looking the Other Way (at page 204).

One of these is representative, at least to those of us who used to farm:

Wheat Seed

Although Anbar province is mostly desert, someone on our side decided the Iraqis would grow wheat there and bought the best, most expensive seed available. The locals, knowing the crop would fail for lack of water, sold the good seed for a profit, bought some cheap stuff, and watched the sprouts die in the field.

Or this one:

Tarmiyah Hospital

The hospital was a major construction project. The Army finished ten rooms but did not put a roof on the facility before abandoning it for security reasons.

The hospital had no power from the grid.

The Iraqi Ministry of Health refused to accept the building because it did not have the staff, budget, or supply systems to open the facility— which had no roof. Cost: no one will ever know, but in the millions.

© 2011 Buren, Peter Van, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (Henry Hold and Co., Kindle Edition, September 2011) (at pp. 213-214) (paragraph split)

And so on.

But — a couple of “by accident” successes

These two achievements were due to a grandmother, once raised on a dairy farm, who had retired from a career at the Department of Agriculture.

Her successes were ironic because her State Department bosses didn’t like her stubborn determination to give the Iraqis something that worked in their environment and that they could actually use.

When faced with the reality that Iraqis could not use cows that produce more milk (as the State Department thought they should) — due to lack of refrigeration and lack of money for feed — “Dairy Carey” asked them whether they were interested in producing better quality milk and less disease-prone cows. They were.

Not content with this success, Dairy Carey went on to introduce Iraq to the idea of 4-H, complete with a pen-pal connection to 4-H kids in Montana:

The Iraqi parents who sat in on our first sessions took control of the club, without our paying them to do it. They organized a visit to a local dentist’s office and all the kids got free cleanings, the first dental care many had ever received.

Eager to help further, the dentist scheduled appointments for a few kids with obvious cavities before enrolling his own children in 4-H.

Not to be outdone, the farmer who donated the lambs now wanted to donate other animals for the kids to raise.

The adults organized a trip to a local civic hall, where another group we had not paid displayed their paintings. Civic leaders who wanted in on the club bought hats for the kids.

[T]he 4-H club was still our most successful project, maybe our only genuinely successful one. We spent almost no money on it, empowered no local thugs, did not distort the local economy, turned it over as soon as possible to the local Iraqis, and got out of the way.

The kids’ selection of officers for the club was their first experience of grassroots democracy.

The powerful sheik’s son went home crying because he lost the race for the presidency to a farmer’s kid, and the sheik did not have anyone’s throat slit in retaliation.

The things the club had to look forward to, pen pals in Montana and more animals , were real and could be done without any money from outside.

© 2011 Buren, Peter Van, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (Henry Hold and Co., Kindle Edition, September 2011) (at pp. 227-228) (paragraph split)

From the wry humor of absurdity — to the despair that was Iraq

Peter Van Buren’s greatest gift is for concise expression of insight into the sorrow that was Iraq. It is possible to write prose that is neither lyrical nor poetic, but captures both simply in its ability to juxtapose mental images, one after the other.

Like here:

The morning after one meeting, an IED detonated at the Mahmudiyah local government building, just across the street from where the 4-H club met.

This was what tore you apart in Iraq, that every small step forward seemed followed by some tragedy.

If I were religious I would have asked why God fucked with these people, and if I was me I would try to believe the sum of karma, the weight of good on one side and bad on the other, would someday, somehow balance, even though I could not for the life of me imagine what that process would be.

Much as we tried to stick a finger in the dike to block the cynicism that otherwise washed over us, we ended up most nights drinking hard, cursing the darkness.

And here:

Private First Class (PFC) Brian Edward Hutson, in Iraq, put the barrel of his M-4 semiautomatic assault rifle into his mouth, with the weapon set for a three-round burst, and blew out the back of his skull.

Under a policy followed by George W. Bush and for more than two years by Barack Obama, the families of suicides do not receive a condolence letter from the President. Suicides apparently do not pertain to freedom. They died of the war, but not in the war.

But if distinctions between causes of death were made at the Pentagon, that was not the case on the ground in Iraq.

The comfort of ritual stood in for public expressions of actual feelings, which were best kept private and close. And the ritual prescribed by regulation was the same, whether the death was by suicide or in combat.

The speeches were strained because the senior officers who feel it important to speak at these events rarely knew, or could know among the many troops under them, the deceased.

But sometimes things surprised you, maybe because of low expectations, maybe because every once in a while somebody stood up and said just what needed to be said.

A young Captain rose without notes. “I was his team leader but I never really knew him . Brian was new here. He didn’t have no nickname and he didn’t spend much time with us. He played Xbox a lot. We don’t know why he committed suicide. We miss him anyway because he was one of us. That’s all I have to say.”

This was how the Army healed itself. It was a simple organization, a vast group of disparate people who came together for their own reasons, lived in austere conditions, and existed to commit violence under bewildering circumstances.

Simply, we will miss him anyway because he was one of us.

We could hate the war, hate the President, hate the Iraqis, but we could not hate one another.

Amen.

Surprising strengths

Van Buren is not military, yet he displays accurate empathy for the military mindset.

This comes across especially well in the chapter entitled, Checkpoints (at page 229) — which discusses the trepidation that stopping cars in a supremely dangerous place has on both those halting them and those being stopped.

If you come from a non-violent world, read this chapter. And wonder no longer how innocents get blasted in situations that combine the immediate prospect of dying with the inability to communicate across languages and cultures.

Larger issues — the difficulty of providing sound governance

I earlier mentioned that We Meant Well and Duty can both be taken as preponderance of evidence arguments that Big Government is always going to be ineffectual at providing sound governance. It will always abuse power, often in expensive and harmful ways.

Van Buren’s Iraq War anecdotes also should make those unfamiliar with the practicalities of providing social and physical infrastructure — like water supply, electricity, sewage treatment, roads, food production, schools, and order — more aware of how much we in the United States take for granted.

This “spoiled brat” blindness causes us to egregiously underestimate the work and cost involved in building infrastructure back up, after we wreck it in another country.

Recommended, without reservation

This is a magnificent short book. It is an excellent and complementing companion to Robert Gates’ Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War.

I recommend We Meant Well especially to people, who have wry sense of the absurdity of the governmental condition. And particularly to those who recognize that — in spite of our inability to be governmentally sensible, en masse — we are irrevocably tied to each other, across cultures and situations, by the essential similarity of our beings.

For example, this image:

I saw a man listening to a six-year-old recite lines from a play seven thousand miles and a world away, using the speakerphone so he had both hands free to cover his eyes.

PeteFree.com

Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (2011) — a Serendipitously Good Companion to — Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War — a Book Review