Peter Van Buren, author of the book, "We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People." He is currently on administrative leave from the U.S. Department of State, where he has worked for 23 years.
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Peter Van Buren. He is a current State Department Foreign Service Officer who, for more than two decades, worked with the State Department and has written a new book. It is called We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. He is in Washington, D.C. Talk about this book, why it has caused such ire within the U.S. government, how they tried to get the publishing delayed. But, you managed to get this book out and have been it seems like exiled for what you have been talking about happened in Iraq, Peter.
PETER VAN BUREN: With the military surge around 2007, the State Department took over the job of reconstructing Iraq, the hearts and minds campaign, the counter-insurgency if you will, whichever name you like to put on it. Spending over $63 billion, the State Department was supposed to clean up the mess that had been made by the invasion to rebuild Iraq into a stable democracy to fulfill the vision of two Presidents that Iraq was going to be something other than a wasteland left over from our invasion. I was set by the State Department in 2009 to participate in this campaign, spend some of the money. Unfortunately, I found that things did not work out the way they were intended to do. What I confronted was a situation that was full of waste, fraud, mismanagement, the type of foolishness that doomed the efforts. I started keeping some notes that eventually evolved into a book that the State Department tried very hard to stop from being published. They were embarrassed by it. They were concerned it would affect their budget negotiations with Congress. They were concerned that it might cause someone to question why the U.S. needed to keep 16,000 people at the world’s largest embassy in the country of Iraq.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Peter, you talk about—-because in the book, you have some very interesting examples. Some of the examples that you mention of the kind of waste and fraud that you witnessed when you were working in the provincial reconstruction team in Iraq, when you were leading it.
PETER VAN BUREN: Sitting here in Washington, it is almost hard for me to imagine the things that we spent money on. In our clumsy attempts to buy love, to make friends, to win over the Iraqis, we sponsored pastry making classes is for Iraqi widows, we handed out gifts of sheep and bees in hopes that Iraqis would pick these things up and make a living from them. We spent $2.5 million on a chicken processing plant that never processed any chicken. We give driving lessons to women. We painted murals on the sides of gymnasiums. We handed out bicycles to children that they were supposed to ride on streets that were so pockmarked with shell craters that you could not take a car down them. We did a number of foolish things that were feel-good projects perhaps, short-term goals at best, they produced some lovely photographs, occasionally some good propaganda, but none of them were designed as part of any organized campaign that could have seriously led to something called reconstruction in Iraq that would have satisfied our political goals of creating enough stability in the economy that young men and young women would choose to participate in the economy rather than becoming insurgents or terrorists. The system was flawed from its beginning. It lacked adult supervision. We basically were cut loose in the countryside to spend money in hopes that something good would come of it, the same joke goes, you would have ten thousand monkeys typing randomly and occasionally they might produce a line of Shakespeare.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about, Peter Van Buren, what happened to you when you came back, when you started to raise concerns and also how it is you’re still working for the State Department—-well, working after fashion.
PETER VAN BUREN: The State Department is very much like the Mafia in the sense that they do not like you to talk about the family outside the family. What my book did was expose some of the failings of State Department leadership from the highest levels down to the levels where I worked that contributed to the lack of success in Iraq. This was not taken very well by the State Department and I was initially punished by having my security clearance removed, ostensibly, because of a link of my blog to a Wikileaks document. In fact, the 500-pound gorilla in the room was the book. The State Department sought to make me disappear, shave off my beard and push me out of the tribe, if you will. I was placed on administrative leave six weeks ago. My badge was taken away, my diplomatic passport was taken from me. I was marched out to the front door where I was ceremoniously told I was officially banned from entering any State Department facility, and I was sent home. Unfortunately, the State Department found no mechanism to actually punish me or challenge me in a way that I could respond to, so they sent me home with full pay, to be quiet, to stay out of the way, to make me go away.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Peter, I just want to return to the point that you and our previous guests have also raised, about the size of the U.S. embassy in Iraq. With the U.S. military withdrawal scheduled for the end of this year, you have also mentioned in interviews and a recent article, as have others that the State Department will be required to hire thousands and thousands of contractors to fulfill security as well as other services that the military previously provided. Can you say a little about that?
PETER VAN BUREN: Absolutely. The State Department has created the world’s largest embassy in Baghdad, literally the size of the Vatican—-something you can see from space—-and with the military leaving, has hired over five thousand mercenaries, contract security people, similar to Blackwater under some different names, as well as its own armed Air Force, its own blood system to supply people who are injured, and a whole lot of other militarized functions that have no place in diplomacy. In many people’s minds, the sixteen thousand personnel who are going to occupy the State Department facilities are nothing more than an extension of the occupation of Iraq, albeit, under civilian control rather than military control. In countries around the world the size of Iraq, the State Department typically will have a mission of one hundred to one hundred fifty people. In Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War, our embassy was relatively small, about the size of the mathematics building as some state college, with about one hundred people working in it. And that is typical around the world, for us to have a medium-sized embassy like that in a country that is about the size and complexity of Iraq. Why sixteen thousand people? Why five thousand armed security contractors? Why an air force, helicopters with weapons? The State Department is occupying Iraq, in an attempt to keep our influence there, absent the military, or least until Joe Biden can the negotiate a return of the military to Iraq.
remainder:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/30/state_dept_veteran_peter_van_buren
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