'We Meant Well': A U.S. Foreign Service officer's candid dispatch from Iraq
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Peter Van Buren chronicles his "daily diet of absurdity."
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As the U.S. war in Iraq draws to a close after nearly nine years, there remains substantial curiosity about just how the estimated more than 1 million Americans -- service members, civilian government employees, contractors and volunteers -- actually lived there and what they did.
Peter Van Buren's book answers that question to a degree, although from a painful or jaded point of view, depending in part on how one perceives the war in retrospect. He is a veteran Department of State foreign service officer. He volunteered to serve in Iraq after a decades-long career that included postings to Japan, Korea and Thailand.
He spent his year in Iraq working in embedded Provisional Reconstruction Teams. "Embedded" has nothing to do with sleeping arrangements; it means that in the field he worked within U.S. military units, who made it possible for him to do the reconstruction tasks he was assigned without getting killed. He called what he and they did "imperial policing."
Mr. Van Buren provides what is an informative, amusing and horrifying account of the disposition of the $172 billion that the United States, Iraq itself involuntarily and other countries provided for Iraq reconstruction. To do the $63 billion U.S. piece, there were altogether some 62, largely uncoordinated U.S. government agencies involved. Some 300 U.S. contractor companies had an estimated 150,000 employees in Iraq.
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, $25
Describing what they all did is where what Mr. Van Buren writes really becomes amusing -- or shocking, depending on how sensitive one is to seeing U.S. taxpayer dollars seep into the Mesopotamian sand.
First Published November 13, 2011 12:00 am
