All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Peter Van Buren.
He spent a year in Iraq as a state department foreign service officer, was a team leader for two provincial reconstruction teams, as they call them.
Uh, now he lives in Washington and he writes about Iraq at his blog, We Meant Well, his book, We Meant Well, How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, will be published this September by the American Empire Project Metropolitan Books.
Welcome to the show, Peter.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me on today.
Uh, well, uh, I'm very happy to have you here.
Thanks very much for joining us.
Let me ask you, who's we in We Meant Well?
We is all of us because there, there were those of us who were there and did what we did, and there were those of us who stood back here and let it happen in our names.
We all share the responsibility for what, what, what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and what's going on today in, in, in Yemen and Libya and in places that we probably haven't even heard of yet.
But more specifically, it was me.
I did it.
I lost the battle for the hearts and minds.
Sorry.
Well, um, what was it that, uh, you were meant to accomplish over there and how bad did you fail at it?
The, the, uh, purpose in going into Iraq, of course, is lost here in, in, in history.
Uh, we, the United States decided that there must've been weapons of mass destruction over there and boy, there weren't any of those.
And then we wanted to get rid of Saddam because he's a bad guy.
And well, you know, we hung him in 2006, but somehow 2011, eight years after the invasion, we were still there.
So kind of rooting around for a reason to kind of keep the party going.
The United States seemed to come to the conclusion that our job was to create a new Iraq, a country that was a self-standing, that was going to be our buddy, maybe sell us a little oil and, and be kind of our anchor post in the Middle East.
Um, we didn't, we weren't really sure how to do that.
Um, and over the course of, of eight years, a number of things were tried.
I was part of the final set of experiments, the provisional provincial reconstruction teams, PRTs, and the concept here, same thing that's happening in Afghanistan now, by the way, the concept here was that we would, uh, we, the American government would fan out into the countryside and we would spend money.
We would build things and, and refurbish schools and dig wells and all these other wonderful things that people would realize were wonderful alternatives to joining terrorist groups.
And then they suddenly wake up one morning, all democratic and kind and fuzzy toward the United States.
And you believe that, that that would work?
Did I believe that?
Yeah.
Um, I have a sense that there might be some truth to it.
You know, I, I don't want to characterize myself as, as a believer per se, but the concept seemed to make some sense before I went there.
The idea would be that if you do nice things for people, maybe they'll sort of like you.
And the idea of helping people who didn't have water and services and medical care appealed to me, that seemed to be consistent with some of the good things that America can do.
The problem was that when I got there, it didn't work out that way.
Instead of actually trying to help people, we simply were charged with spending money in ways that, that seemed to fit with political winds that were blowing, that were designed to create photo opportunities and happy talk news stories.
But mostly what we did was just shovel money into the hands of a collection of Iraqi pirates, carpetbaggers, thieves, and sheiks who grew up around us like some kind of mushroom plant or something to take the money.
Well, it sounds just like any government program here in America.
Um, this one had this, this wonderful nastiness to it in that we were not just wasting money.
We were wasting a bit of ourselves, a bit of what makes America, when we do it right, a better place.
We were telling people we were going to fix things for them.
We were telling the Iraqis we were there to help them to rebuild their country.
And at the same time, we were handing over as much money as we could to Tony Soprano.
When you waste money on things here in the States, A, at least the money somewhere in the United States, and B, to the extent that you've got money to spend, you're not doing any harm.
Over there, we actually did harm because we empowered thugs and gangsters and we diminished the reputation of the United States by saying one thing, doing another.
Well, now I hate to oversimplify this, but, uh, you know, going back years and years and years back when the war was real popular, one of my jobs, one of my first jobs for antiwar.com was answering the letters to the editor and the angry soldiers would all say, Hey, we're winning out there and you don't know what you're talking about in this and that.
And I would always say, well, do you even know what the Iraqi national alliance is and who these guys are?
The al-hakims and who you're fighting for and who Muqtada al-Sadr is.
And, and do you really think that you're going to be able to keep Iraq after you're done installing the majority in power, the majority that's allied with the neighboring state and doesn't need you, you've already lost.
You lost the day that Sadr started fighting in March of 2004.
Give me a break.
This thing, you know, when, when, uh, Ali al-Sistani said, we want one man, one vote and we won't settle for less.
The whole game has been over since then.
All America did was fight to install a bunch of people who don't need them in power there.
And now to read your article, nobody in Iraq has no American in Iraq has got their head around this yet.
You know, Americans like their wars to, to be kind of like football games.
You've got the team on in blue on one side and the team in green on the other side and, and the game starts and it goes on for a while.
And at the end there's a score and there's no ambiguity.
Everybody agrees, Hey, the guys wearing green won, they won 27 to 14.
Woo.
Um, the problem is, is that wars are rarely like that.
We, the war hasn't been like that for the United States since 1945 and Iraq was, was a terrible, terrible mistake.
We, we didn't really know what winning was when we started.
And so we kept announcing that we'd already won at various points along the way.
The Bush's mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier was probably the most prominent one and well known, but throughout the time we just kept announcing things were just about over with.
I'm going to be doing a piece for my blog in the next week or two, um, called turning points where I'd gone back and over the course of the eight years of the war, identified something like 20 or 30 different times when a senior government official announced we'd reached a turning point in the war.
And that sounds kind of silly when you look back and say, gee, we were talking about turning points in 2003, but we kept doing it.
Uh, the Bush white house people kept announcing turning points right up until they walked out the door, um, to replace the current administration, which unfortunately seems committed to extending the occupation of Iraq long past the date that was negotiated for us to pack up and go home.
Now, is that the same thing as saying that they're betting that solder is bluffing?
Sauter is an interesting guy.
And, and of course we helped create him as his power arose because he opposed the United States.
Had the United States not been there to serve as, as the bad guy for him, he probably would not have emerged as the power figure that, that he is.
Um, we had him on the wanted list, uh, for a while.
Then he went off to Iran and was a student there, um, as they say, and now he's back and he's not on the wanted list anymore.
And he's making threats about, uh, turning his militia back loose.
A large portion of the drop in violence was that Sauter asked his militia to stand down.
And they did at the point where he takes the blinders back off and releases them.
You have the potential for extreme violence, particularly violence directed against the remaining Americans in Iraq.
When it seems that, uh, he's consistently since 2003 said, leave, you're not welcome here.
We don't want to hear.
And at this point now, best I can tell Nouriel Maliki's power as prime minister is completely dependent on Sauter.
The only way that Maliki can ask the Americans to stay is if Sauter says it's okay.
And do you think there's any chance that he's going to, or do you think that, I guess the real question is, do the guys at the Pentagon realize they're going to have to fight their way to Kuwait if they don't just go?
There was a, uh, interesting story that, uh, quoted people for in the New York Times recently, that the United States may have be, may be distributing cash payments to the various sheikhs and warlords along the road out of Iraq in order to assure that when it is time for us to drive out, um, we'll be able to drive out more or less safely.
I'm happy to hear that.
So that means they think that they're going.
So I, I, it, I don't think, I mean, it's all supposition at this point.
My, my personal guess is that the United States will withdraw most, but not all of the troops.
Um, I, I can't imagine that we would give up the opportunity to hold on at least, at least in, in kind of a shadow.
That brings us to your piece for Tom Dispatch.
It's at antiwar.com.
How not to withdraw from Iraq about the new state department army.
Then we'll be right back with Paul Van Buren, everybody.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Peter Van Buren.
So former state department official in Iraq.
Uh, he's got this great piece.
It's really a well-written funny stuff, uh, about a pretty somber subject.
If you ask me, uh, how not to withdraw from Iraq is Tom Englehardt's title.
It's, uh, under Tom Englehardt's name at antiwar.com right now.
Um, also, uh, occupying Iraq state department style.
And, um, no, I forgot.
I was going to go find the, uh, Landay story in McClatchy newspapers about Hillary Clinton's private army over there.
I guess she finally gets to be the commander in chief of something, huh?
Is that right?
I didn't, I never thought of it that way, but perhaps you're right.
It's time for, uh, for that to come due first.
I got to give a quick shout out to, to Tom Englehardt and Tom dispatch.
It's a terrific website and a place where a lot of alternative viewpoints are being heard right now, including my own.
And so nothing but good, but good news to be found there.
Yeah.
We run virtually every one of his foreign policy pieces, uh, under, as you're saying, uh, many, many different authors with Tom's little introductory essay at the top, uh, under his name and antiwar.com and, and have for years.
He's a hell of a great radio interview too.
The guy's brilliant.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
What, uh, what you refer to as a private army is in fact, a private army.
The state department is planning on spending over a billion dollars a year.
And the contracts are already out for, I think the next four years with renewable options to hire 5,500 mercenaries from such a delightful places as a Blackwater or one or whatever name they're operating today, I think they're called Fred right now, or, or Joe Smith, I think is the name they're using currently, but, um, they've issued these contracts, a billion dollars a year to hire 5,500 mercenaries to protect the embassy in Baghdad and to escort the American diplomats there around town, they're going to serve as essentially an occupation force to replace whatever the military does finally pull out of Iraq at the end of this year.
In addition, the state department will also be purchasing, or is in the process of purchasing 60 armored vehicles and 46 aircraft, including armed helicopters, all of which are ostensibly designed to protect the embassy and protect the diplomats.
I mean, the only thing you can kind of say is good thing, uh, you know, we won this war or who knows how many troops we'd need there to protect us.
Right.
Well, you know, it's funny because in your article, you write like, uh, 5,500 mercs is a lot and, you know, I don't know, maybe that really is a lot, but you also write that they're basically slaves, these Ugandan and Peruvian indentured servants that are being used as the guards there.
And I'm thinking 5,000 men, I'm picturing a roof of Saigon, uh, embassy moment here coming soon.
It's going to have to be a pretty big roof.
There's, there's actually two flavors of, of mercenaries that are hired for these things.
The first are, are the Ugandans and the Peruvians, but for the same reasons that third world people clean our hotel rooms and clean up at our restaurants and do the, the, the dirty jobs in America.
Um, the same reason we do that, the same people have been hired overseas to guard our, our embassy in Iraq.
Um, these are folks who are pulled out of rural areas in Peru, pulled out of, uh, rural areas in Uganda who are paid substandard wages to be guards, to be cannon fodder, if you will.
They have the tough jobs.
They're the ones who stand on the, on the perimeters and the gates.
And they're the ones who get it first when it's, when something happens.
The second level are the people who are generally Americans with a few British and a few South Africans.
These are usually former military who have joined one of the world's new private corporate armies.
Things like Blackwater is the most prominently named one, but the two other companies actually have the biggest contracts in Iraq with the state department.
One is called SOC.
Um, and the other is called Triple Canopy.
And these are the so-called shock troops of the, uh, of the state department army.
These are- Triple Canopy.
They're, uh, our friends from Abu Ghraib prison.
We remember them.
Triple Canopy has sent contractors of various shapes, sizes, and colors with various different, uh, backgrounds.
They, they, uh, were active in the, in the prison system.
They're active in different parts of Iraq right now.
Um, they also have subsidiaries that have different names.
Some of this stuff is harder to track down than, than, than a drug deal.
Who owns who and who's beholden to who.
But these guys are the folks that I refer to in my article as, as frat brothers with guns.
The, they're, they're, they're young people.
Some of them, most of them had some kind of military training, but a lot of them are not the same level of professionalism that you see in, in the American soldiers.
These are folks who are bullies, who are want to show off how tough they are.
They're, they're kind of like the folks that the police officer was talking about on your commercial break who join up so that they can wear a badge, hang a gun on their hip and then push other people around.
Um, that may be a lot of fun in a frat house and it may or may not work in, in some other situations, but when you're talking about diplomacy, that's a different story here.
You're trying to win friends for America.
You're trying to influence foreign people to our points of view and bullying them, pushing them around with, with guys with guns is really not a good way to do that.
Well, you know, I thought the, the term you used in the article was a pretty descriptive.
You said they're like army soldiers only without the non-commissioned officers and officers to keep them in line.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
One of the things that I did learn when I was in Iraq and something that may set me apart from some of your guests is that I was very, very impressed by the professionalism of, of our military.
I hadn't served in the military.
I grew up in a time when, when the draft had already passed and I hadn't had a lot of exposure to the military.
And when I went to Iraq, I was embedded with them.
I didn't live at the embassy compound with what we called club fed.
I lived out at a forward operating base in the middle of the desert with, with the military.
And, and I was in fact, one of the few civilians at the base.
And I came to understand how, how the military works when it works well.
It works because there are responsible people who recognize that you've got a lot of folks with guns walking around.
And the only way to make sure that works in an organized fashion is to have rules and to respect a chain of command.
Obviously the military is not without blood on its hands and there are some, some terrible things happened in Iraq and it happened elsewhere, but that's not the side I saw.
I saw a lot of professionalism and a lot of folks who were kind of like me, people who were stuck in a situation that they didn't necessarily think they were signing up for trying to make the best of it.
I don't see that in these private armies, in these mercenary armies.
What I see there are folks who are bullies who say, Hey, I've got a gun and you don't, so I'm right and you're wrong.
Folks who are almost relishing the fact that they get the play army without having to succumb to the discipline that a real army requires.
Hmm.
Well, and you know, you also talk in your article about kind of, I guess the perspective that time has given us now looking back, especially from this far into the future, from when this thing started, you know, 2011 here, what a big joke.
Saddam Hussein's going to nuke America.
You're all going to die in your jammies in the middle of the night.
If we don't start this war, boohoo, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl and their lies and the, the, the mental rape of the American people that led for this thing to happen, the lies, the, the manipulation from the very top down is just, uh, to look at where we are now in Iraq is to wonder what was any of this for.
Scott, the important thing is to realize that the same things are happening now.
The way we can look back 10, 11 years ago and say, Oh my God, how silly we looked saying mission accomplished and how silly we were thinking we were going to invade Iraq and everything was going to be okay.
And, and yeah, they lied about everything.
The stuff that now is is stuff that we kind of accept as common knowledge.
It's happening again.
We're at war in Libya.
We're at war in Yemen.
We're at war in Pakistan.
We're at war in probably four or five other places that we haven't heard of yet.
And the same lies are being repeated that America's national interests somehow require us to drop bombs on Libya, that America's national interests somehow require us to spend $2 billion a week in Afghanistan, that America's national interests are at stake in Pakistan or Yemen or any of these other places.
The same way that we can look back now at Iraq and say, what were we thinking?
How could we believe that?
Well, we're doing it again.
And unless we stop now and think out loud about what we're doing, and answer the question of really, what is our interest in these things?
We're going to be doomed to repeat the same story over and over again.
Well, now, do you think it is a matter of certain interests that, uh, you know, are benefiting and are ruling the policy?
Or you really think everybody has this kind of doe-eyed, we-meant-well sort of attitude?
I wish, I wish I could point to a conspiracy theory.
I wish that...
Well, it's not a conspiracy to point out that all the neocons had ties with Lockheed and the Israel lobby, you know.
Lots of people made a lot of money off this.
There's no question about that.
And lots of people are still making money.
The state department, as I said, is going to spend a billion dollars a year on security.
That money's all going someplace.
Um, and it's not going to a Peruvian gate guard.
There's no question about that.
I guess I would almost feel better if, if we could point to something like blood for oil, but in fact, it's blood for nothing.
And that makes it even more damning.
So in other words, it really is the false belief that, yeah, we're going to do right by these people here on the part of enough people implementing the policy, that that really is the justification.
I'm afraid, I'm afraid I agree with you.
I'm afraid you're right.
Well, I'm not sure I agree with that.
I'm just trying to make sure that's what you're saying.
I'm afraid I agree with the statement.
I, I, sure there's people.
Well, listen, I mean, I, I have to believe that you're right to a great degree anyway, right?
I mean, it's all, you know, MSNBC wants to sell dish soap and so that's why they're for war, you know?
Everybody has their own, their own interests, but it, of course, the ideology of the white man's burden is kind of a, it's a powerful thing.
We're here to help these poor people who don't have proper sewage after all.
And that kind of deal.
A lot of people really do believe that.
And, and I, I had a certain, I'm not that naive, but I had a certain element of that in my head when I volunteered to go to Iraq and, and, and take on these projects.
It wasn't quite as, as, as negative as, as colonialism, but it certainly was inspired by the idea that, Hey, we're America.
We know all this stuff.
We've got all these resources.
We have all this money.
We can do something good for these folks.
And instead, nah, it was a combination of, of just our stupidity, our ignorance, our, our hubris, our, our feeling that, that we knew better what they, what they needed than they knew what they needed.
And we just stood back and we couldn't find a match to set fire to the money.
So we gave it away to a bunch of thieves.
Very well put.
And you know, the whole article's written like that too.
Y'all highly recommend it.
It's under Tom Englehart's name at antiwar.com right now.
And of course you can find it at tomdispatch.com.
Peter Van Buren, how not to withdraw from Iraq, occupying Iraq state department style.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thank you.
