We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (American Empire Project)

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Description

“One diplomat’s darkly humorous and in the long run scathing assault on on the subject of the whole lot the military and State Department have done―or tried to do―because 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 these kind of projects and more in the costliest hearts-and-minds campaign because 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 unnecessary projects, bureaucratic fumbling, overwhelmed soldiers, and oblivious administrators secluded on this planet’s largest embassy, who fail to realize that you’ll’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 creator―and readers―appalled and disillusioned, but wiser.

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