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Speaking Truth to Power
(This article by William Astore originally appeared on Huffington Post)
When you dare speak truth to power, the reality is that power already knows the truth, doesn’t want you to share it, and will punish you for your trouble.
That’s the clear lesson from the State Department’s persecution of Peter Van Buren, who dared to tell the American people about the failures of Iraq reconstruction in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (2011). His “crime” was his unflattering portrayal of misguided and mismanaged U.S. projects in Iraq, from American books translated into Arabic that were never read to a high-tech chicken factory that never worked to sewerage systems that grew worse rather than better despite infusions of machinery and countless millions of dollars.
Van Buren deserves a commendation for his honesty. A true servant of the American people, his cautionary (and often wryly amusing) tale should teach us that so-called nation-building efforts are difficult to implement and even more difficult to sustain. Even more: the resource-intensive, high-tech approach of U.S. government officials and private contractors is rarely well-suited for places like Iraq and Afghanistan, whose resource- and knowledge-base is less well developed, at least by American standards. Approaches that work, Van Buren suggests, are those that are better tuned to engaging and empowering the locals within specific cultural settings, an approach rarely followed by American “experts” and corporations, eager as the latter were to make a buck while trying to show quick results.
My own experience with winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis was limited but illustrative of Van Buren’s conclusions. Back in 2004, an American official in Iraq contacted the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where I then worked, for help in translating a Peter, Paul and Mary song about tolerance. The idea was that Iraqi schoolchildren could be inculcated with a love of diversity, or at least a tolerance of the same, if they were taught the lyrics to this song. We engaged our Arabic translators, who quickly advised us that the lyrics to this touchy-feely American song would likely baffle Iraqi schoolchildren even when translated into Arabic. The American official at the other end of our conference call was very disappointed to hear that her bright idea to promote tolerance in Iraqi schools by translating feel-good anthems to diversity was a cultural non-starter.
A great strength of Van Buren’s account is to show how we Americans delude ourselves into believing that our approach and our culture can be grafted successfully onto Iraqi and Afghan situations. Intentions may often be good but results are mixed at best because U.S. providers want to show rapid progress even as they’re encouraged to allocate resources as quickly as possible (often a formidable task, given the bureaucratic red tape involved). Can-do spirit is frustrated by the realities of contractor and indigenous greed, cultural differences, and the short-term mentality of American managers who rarely occupy the same position for more than a few months.
Van Buren explains to us why the dedicated efforts of individuals like himself made so little difference in Iraq. His is a cautionary tale of waste, mismanagement, and hubris, one that should serve to discourage (or at least to inform) current efforts in Afghanistan.
It’s not that our government doesn’t want to hear that message; the powerful already know how much we’ve bungled these “reconstruction” efforts. It’s that they don’t want you the American people to know how much they’ve bungled these efforts.
Van Buren shines a light in places that many would prefer to remain dark. And that, sadly, is rarely rewarded, even less so today in an administration that’s determined to silence whistleblowers from all quarters.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
US diplomat suspended for Iraq book, blog with WikiLeaks link
(This article originally appeared on the Agence France Press site, written by Jim Mannion)
The State Department has suspended a veteran diplomat for a book critical of US policy in Iraq and irreverent blog posts that included a link to a WikiLeaks cable, he said Wednesday.
Peter Van Buren, a 23 year foreign service officer who worked in human relations, said he was escorted out of the State Department on Monday and barred from returning for two days while officials there decide what to do next with him.
They had stripped him of his top secret security clearance a few days earlier, he said.
“We are unable to discuss individual personnel matters, and therefore have no comment about Mr Van Buren’s situation,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.
But in a phone interview with AFP, Van Buren said his irreverent account of his experiences in Iraq, in a book entitled “We Meant Well – How I Helped Lose the Battle for Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People,” appeared to have precipitated the action.
There were also articles he wrote for the Huffington Post and Salon.com, and blogs on his website, “WeMeantWell.com,” which he freely admits were published without prior State Department permission.
“The State Department said they need 30 working days in order to clear or approve any submission, and unfortunately that is out of the zone of reality for blogging and tweeting and Facebook updating,” he said.
“I submit it is nothing but a prior restraint on my free speech. I choose not to follow it, and I expect to be punished,” he said.One blog post linked to a WikiLeaks cable describing a 2009 meeting Senator John McCain had with Moamer Kadhafi in Tripoli.
Van Buren said he wanted to make the point “how quickly enemies became friends, and friends became enemies again, and wondering what that meant about US foreign policy.”
“This was not the nuclear launch codes, or Hillary’s Victoria Secret catalog or anything like that. It was pretty mild stuff. I believe it was listed as ‘confidential,’ which is the lowest form of classification.”
Van Buren said he had submitted the book for pre-publication review more than a year ago, with no response, and began blogging in April of this year.
It wasn’t until June that he was told he shouldn’t be blogging, and not until September 1 that they raised the WikiLeaks link.
“That was followed by two interrogation sessions with our security people,” he said. Then on September 20, they demanded redactions to his book, and followed that by suspending his security clearance.
The redactions were to a chapter titled “A Spooky Dinner,” which described a dinner with some CIA officials in Baghdad at one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.That demand was just six days before the book was to go to book stores, and he refused to comply.
“I think it’s something of an excuse, if you will, to use the security apparatus as a way to shut somebody up when they don’t have another tool to do it with.“It’s unfortunate but I’m not the first person to have found themselves at the pointy end of that stick.”
Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Jason Linkins on HuffPo
Jason Linkins on HuffPo: Everybody go read We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren and Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War by Matt Gallagher, please!
Jason also says near the end of his article, about Rick Perry, “FOR PETE’S SAKE, WHAT WILL PETE THINK?” but I don’t think he was actually asking me.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Here a billion, there a billion…
… And pretty soon you’re talking real money. No one is really sure exactly how much the war in Iraq actually cost the United States (in dollars; in prestige and our good name, well, priceless). Estimates vary by a trillion dollars over/under and there is a whole web site with a spinning dollar amount to check. The Army has lost a bunch of the receipts, and some stuff was paid for with Paypal, and then the credit card got stolen and…Anyway, since most of the American troops will be leaving Iraq over the next few months, and because shipping charges are so damn high, it is cheaper for us to leave behind most stuff we brought to Iraq. We’re saying it is all being transferred to the Government of Iraq, but in fact we’re really just leaving most of it the same way you left the old couch behind when you blasted out of that off-campus apartment without paying the last month’s rent.
The always-prescient Dan Froomkin on HuffPo has the story. Dan tells us:
With just over two months until the last U.S. troops are currently due to leave Iraq, the Department of Defense is engaged in a mad dash to give away things that cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars to buy and build. The giveaways include enormous, elaborate military bases and vast amounts of military equipment that will be turned over to the Iraqis, mostly just to save the expense of bringing it home. “It’s all sunk costs,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton. “It’s money that we spent and we’re not going to recoup.”
Check. War is a bad investment. Hear that Cheney– we aren’t going to recoup that investment. Iraqi oil did not, now officially, pay for the war.
When the Iraqis take over a Forward Operating Base they also get the things that go with it, such as containerized housing units, water and fuel tanks, air conditioning units, generators, refrigerators, porta-johns, beds and mattresses, office equipment, fences, dining facilities and so on. According to Lt. Col Melinda F. Morgan, a Pentagon spokeswoman, excess defense items worth $70.5 million have been turned over to the Iraqis, with more, worth about $40 million, to go. U.S. forces have also given the Iraqis non-excess military items worth $47.7 million.
Let’s see, that adds up to a jazillion dollars including shipping and handling. Luckily, the Chinese have loaned us their Dad’s VISA card, so it’s cool, right? Maybe not says HuffPo:
I’m thinking about the size of what was wasted there, and thinking about how what we spent in Iraq was all borrowed. In a crazy way, what we left in Iraq was our good credit rating.
Oops. Everyone, please write your Congressperson and demand that the defense budget not be cut. Not one penny. They’re gonna have to replace all that stuff left in Iraq before the next war, and that is going to be expensive. Demand Congress not fund, well, everything else. Whatever, our country is so screwed.
Read the whole article if you can stand to on Huffington Post.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Huffington Post: Two Columns
The Huffington Post ran two columns of mine this week. One is another excerpt from the book, the other a sad reaction to the US assassination of American Citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki. If you have not had a chance to read one or both, please take a look.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Freedom is Not Free
The story of my interrogation by the State Department, over a link dating from August on my blog to a Wikileaks document already on the web (I was accused of disclosing classified information because of the link!) is all over the web.
If you have not read it at TomDispatch, or are a State Department employee blocked by a firewall from reading TomDispatch, you can still see the article on a growing number of mirrors:
American Conservative Magazine
warandpeaceinthemiddleeast.com
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style: A Frat House With Guns in Baghdad
If you did not have a chance to read my article, Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style: A Frat House With Guns in Baghdad, yesterday at TomDispatch, or work at the Department of State where TomDispatch is still blocked because it once had some Wikileaks spunge on it, you can catch up at one of your fave sites, below:
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Buy Peter’s Books on Amazon!
