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The Annals of Chicken Diplomacy
Joshua Foust over at The Atlantic serves up a terrific article on how the US has used (poorly) “chicken diplomacy” in various ways. A very worthwhile read.
Foust quotes from We Meant Well:
The U.S. has engaged in its own odd chicken diplomacy as well. Peter Van Buren, a career Foreign Service Officer with the State Department, published a memoir last year of his time serving in Iraq. One of the the most memorable chapters in his book, appropriately titled “Chicken Sh*t,” is about efforts to revive the Iraqi chicken industry. Van Buren describes the lavish funding a nearby chicken factory received to get new equipment and to hire people.
The factory, it turned out, was worthless. Brazil dominated the the global market for frozen whole chickens and Iraq just couldn’t produce poultry cheaply enough to compete (Brazil defends this domination zealously). Worse still, van Buren recounted for NPR, the factory didn’t have refrigeration because it did not have electricity — which makes the idea of a frozen chicken factory rather moot. But rather than admitting failure, van Buren and his team actually created a false factory for when touring VIPs came by, hiring random people to sit on the production line while it processed worthless chickens they could never sell, all to impress a Congressional delegation or administration official into thinking the Iraqi economy was thriving under U.S. leadership.
Interested in reading the full chapter Chicken Sh*t from the Iraq Reconstruction?
Also, some photos of the chicken factory.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Some Recent Articles
Thanks to the following outlets for publishing excerpts from my book this week!
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Chicken Shit
If you’ve surfed over from the excerpt from my book on TomDispatch, or you’ve read the chapter entitled “Chicken Shit” in the book, you know all about the $2.58 million failed chicken processing plant in Iraq your tax dollars paid for.
But could you imagine the scene? To help out, here are some photos from the actual plant, including an image from the chicken beheading room not usually shown to visitors. Mmmm… tasty.
Best of all, KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A radio host Jon Weiner located actual US Army propaganda video of the chicken plant.
(If the video is not showing, follow this link)
When watching the video (yeah, you tax dollars paid for that too), be sure to note the sign at the very beginning, and the line in the narration that says the plant employs 400 Iraqis. See if you can spot more than 10 working there.
When we can’t even get the propaganda right, it is really time to go home troops.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Lunch with Ron Paul
Peter had lunch today with Congressman Dr. Ron Paul and four other Congressmen who work closely with him. Dr. Paul was one of only six Congresspeople who voted against the Iraq war in 2002. The Congressman and Peter spent over an hour together, with Dr. Paul asking some very probing questions. He and his foreign affairs staffer, who has read the book, agreed that the chapter Chicken Shit, about a failed $2.58 million project to process chicken in rural Iraq, best captured the insanity of what we faced in Iraq.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
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