Things I Read: We Meant Well. It would be funny it it weren't true.
I just finished the book I mentioned a few posts ago, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by current enemy of the State, Peter Van Buren.
I thought I should get into the habit of jotting down my thoughts after finishing a book. Not so much to review, but to consolidate the reading experience and keep the material fresh in mind. Gradually, as this whole writing things becomes second nature, I'll move on to critiques and analysis. For now, I'll keep these entries brief and informal, for my personal benefit.
As mentioned, We Meant Well is a scintillating read, rich in insight, unusually entertaining, and unaffectedly tragic. It's a book on the state reconstruction process, but it's a raw account of one man's lived experience, not any of that academic prosody that a topic like state building might suggest. It's more tragicomedy than manual, more reflective than didactic.
The book opens up in an all too foreboding manner. It's about six years since Saddam's authoritarian regime was toppled and Van Buren, an FSO, is on his way to Iraq to join the front for the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis. (Where the Department of the Defense tends to the "kinetic" aspects of the war, the State Department and related organizations seek to build a stronger civil society so Iraqi's can pull themselves up from there on two feet.) But Van Buren's entry into Iraq is already laden by the usual bureaucratic nightmare of large institutions. Going to Iraq involves a lot of waiting--waiting for official clearance, waiting for paper work, waiting for God to take pity on this quagmire of a war. When he finally gets there, he finds himself swamped in a sea of excess, ignorance, and insincerity. As an ePRT leader (embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team), it is Van Buren's duty to oversee reconstruction projects, big and small, that are supposedly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
But, as Van Buren finds out the hard way, most of these projects amount to little more than PR opps for the embassy. Little to no due diligence is done, the success of a project is measured less on the actual impact it makes but on the "potential" it can create (a euphemism for 'spend as much as you can and who cares how the money is used'), and most people there could care less about the actual well-being of the Iraqis.
This is not to say, however, that Van Buren finds himself a moral outlier in a crowd of self-serving phonies. While he does chronicle a lot of where the State Department went wrong and while his book will surely add fuel to the outrage of American tax payers in exposing the futility of the State's projects, the more memorable parts of the books are always the chapters wherein he details an inadvertent but genuine successes, or when he touches upon the humanity between soldiers, civvies, and the hell they've come to know as life. Some of it is so poignant in its willingness to confront existence and absurdity head on.
For instance, there's a section where Van Buren discusses the different categories of people living on the base. In sum, there are the First World Contractors, the soldiers, the few State officials, and there are the Third World Contractors. Many of the security guards on the base are from Uganda. Why? Let Van Buren explain:
Paying Ugandans saved money because guard duty was boring until it became suddenly violent; then it was boring again for a long time. Americans did not want to do such work, and it cost a lot of money to get Americans to volunteer for the Army. Ugandas were cheap, they knew about weapons as former child soldiers, and for some reason the contracting company had a connection to Uganda.
That detail about the now U.S.-employed guards as former Ugandan child soldiers really struck me. It's a subtle, perhaps even unintentional moral question--did their lives as child soldiers actually serve a purpose for them later in life? Would they be hired if they weren't already acquainted, and beaten down from a previous life of violence? It's an uncomfortable question I dare not dwell too long upon. But it's there, even if it's not the point of the passage.
The only things that the book kind of thew me off of on were the structure and sometimes overwrought tone. Regarding the latter, I understand that Van Buren is trying honestly to expose some of the follies and ineffectiveness of the government, but he does dangerously come close to positioning himself on a moral high ground that can be off putting to the reader. Thankfully, whenever he veers towards self-extolling, he returns to levelheadedness quickly. Regarding the former, well, I know Van Buren started a blog to accompany the blog, and that's what the book itself sometimes felt like--a blog, a collection of post put together. I guess it's because there was no grand project tying everything together, no change or progress we see. That is just the nature of the assignment though.
All in all, highly recommended. I wrote this post on the fly and am loathe to re-read what I just typed out, so I hope it's somewhat intelligible!
I thought I should get into the habit of jotting down my thoughts after finishing a book. Not so much to review, but to consolidate the reading experience and keep the material fresh in mind. Gradually, as this whole writing things becomes second nature, I'll move on to critiques and analysis. For now, I'll keep these entries brief and informal, for my personal benefit.
As mentioned, We Meant Well is a scintillating read, rich in insight, unusually entertaining, and unaffectedly tragic. It's a book on the state reconstruction process, but it's a raw account of one man's lived experience, not any of that academic prosody that a topic like state building might suggest. It's more tragicomedy than manual, more reflective than didactic.
The book opens up in an all too foreboding manner. It's about six years since Saddam's authoritarian regime was toppled and Van Buren, an FSO, is on his way to Iraq to join the front for the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis. (Where the Department of the Defense tends to the "kinetic" aspects of the war, the State Department and related organizations seek to build a stronger civil society so Iraqi's can pull themselves up from there on two feet.) But Van Buren's entry into Iraq is already laden by the usual bureaucratic nightmare of large institutions. Going to Iraq involves a lot of waiting--waiting for official clearance, waiting for paper work, waiting for God to take pity on this quagmire of a war. When he finally gets there, he finds himself swamped in a sea of excess, ignorance, and insincerity. As an ePRT leader (embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team), it is Van Buren's duty to oversee reconstruction projects, big and small, that are supposedly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
But, as Van Buren finds out the hard way, most of these projects amount to little more than PR opps for the embassy. Little to no due diligence is done, the success of a project is measured less on the actual impact it makes but on the "potential" it can create (a euphemism for 'spend as much as you can and who cares how the money is used'), and most people there could care less about the actual well-being of the Iraqis.
This is not to say, however, that Van Buren finds himself a moral outlier in a crowd of self-serving phonies. While he does chronicle a lot of where the State Department went wrong and while his book will surely add fuel to the outrage of American tax payers in exposing the futility of the State's projects, the more memorable parts of the books are always the chapters wherein he details an inadvertent but genuine successes, or when he touches upon the humanity between soldiers, civvies, and the hell they've come to know as life. Some of it is so poignant in its willingness to confront existence and absurdity head on.
For instance, there's a section where Van Buren discusses the different categories of people living on the base. In sum, there are the First World Contractors, the soldiers, the few State officials, and there are the Third World Contractors. Many of the security guards on the base are from Uganda. Why? Let Van Buren explain:
Paying Ugandans saved money because guard duty was boring until it became suddenly violent; then it was boring again for a long time. Americans did not want to do such work, and it cost a lot of money to get Americans to volunteer for the Army. Ugandas were cheap, they knew about weapons as former child soldiers, and for some reason the contracting company had a connection to Uganda.
That detail about the now U.S.-employed guards as former Ugandan child soldiers really struck me. It's a subtle, perhaps even unintentional moral question--did their lives as child soldiers actually serve a purpose for them later in life? Would they be hired if they weren't already acquainted, and beaten down from a previous life of violence? It's an uncomfortable question I dare not dwell too long upon. But it's there, even if it's not the point of the passage.
The only things that the book kind of thew me off of on were the structure and sometimes overwrought tone. Regarding the latter, I understand that Van Buren is trying honestly to expose some of the follies and ineffectiveness of the government, but he does dangerously come close to positioning himself on a moral high ground that can be off putting to the reader. Thankfully, whenever he veers towards self-extolling, he returns to levelheadedness quickly. Regarding the former, well, I know Van Buren started a blog to accompany the blog, and that's what the book itself sometimes felt like--a blog, a collection of post put together. I guess it's because there was no grand project tying everything together, no change or progress we see. That is just the nature of the assignment though.
All in all, highly recommended. I wrote this post on the fly and am loathe to re-read what I just typed out, so I hope it's somewhat intelligible!