All right, Shell, 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.
You might have seen he's got a couple recent articles under Tom Englehardt's name in the archive at antiwar.com.
The wiki leaked at the State Department and how the American taxpayer got plucked in Iraq deserted from the new book, We Meant Well, how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
Welcome back to the show.
Peter, how are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
It's great to be here.
I just want to warn your audience that if the lead into this was the Onion News, everything we're going to say here is actually sadly true.
Yeah, I know.
That's the thing is a lot of it really does sound like an Onion dispatch or like I was telling you there while I was getting you lined up during the break.
A lot of this reads like Joseph Heller, like Catch-22.
This really is how the Army is.
It's like it reads like a story of the Soviet Union, only without the internal oppression, you know, and plenty of external violence and far less vodka, I'm afraid.
Yeah, probably so.
Although I'm sure there was some vodka in Iraq, right?
Well, we may do.
There were hardships, but we may do, Scott.
I see.
I can just see you guys like Trapper John and little Hawkeye with their little still.
Actually, the very limited amount of alcohol that we had was much needed.
We worked, I was embedded with the military, and so we worked under what they call General Order Number One, which essentially prohibited all fun in Iraq, and it specifically prohibited alcohol.
The troops over there are not allowed to drink, and so any alcohol that was consumed was consumed very much off the radar.
Yeah.
Well, and right out in front of everybody, right?
I mean, come on.
Was it really like that?
Yes, it was.
They were very strict about these things.
You couldn't have alcohol.
You couldn't fraternize.
You weren't allowed to have pets.
It was a fairly strict life out there for us all.
All right.
Now, and for us all means State Department people over there supposedly doing a nation-building project.
That's correct, but we need to draw the line between State Department people like myself who were embedded with the military and lived under these austere conditions, and State Department people who worked at the embassy, which on Thursday and Friday nights turned into the world's worst holiday and bar scene, though albeit with plenty of alcohol.
The embassy had its own bar, which they insisted on naming Bad Daddies, of all things, and people would go in there and drink and drink and drink and drink.
The military was not allowed.
It was State Department only, but for about $20, you could make an evening of it.
It was quite a place.
All right.
Well, so how hard did you work, and how much did you accomplish there?
I worked pretty hard, but I'm afraid I don't know how much we actually accomplished.
The United States, over the course of eight years in Iraq, spent $63 billion of your tax money on the reconstruction of Iraq.
This was money that was spent supposedly to recover the economy, to rebuild the infrastructure that we destroyed, and to create an environment that made it less likely that people were going to be terrorists, and more likely that they were going to be friends of America.
At the end of the day, as I write about in the book, We Meant Well, our good intentions were simply not enough, and I'm afraid that we accomplished very, very little.
Well, and even with expertise, I mean, you make the point in here that all the contractors that you're working with and stuff, they had no idea.
They were in no position whatsoever to be the local chief of building up civil society, or the local chief of redoing all the sewage, or the local chief of anything.
And yet, it also seems like, the way that, I mean, you're occupying somebody else's country, if these people really had been, you know, the chief of sewage from Cincinnati or whatever, they wouldn't have been in any better position to carry out any of these edicts.
You're taking away a lot of the fine, good points of the book here, because, in fact, you've summed up in a sentence or two most of the problems.
All right, well, interview's over.
Okay, thank you very much.
We'll go back.
Let's go see if that vodka shipment has arrived from Iraq.
The thing is, is that instead of sending people who were experts at their work to do these things in Iraq, to spend all this money, we sent a lot of amateurs.
I include myself in that category.
I'd never been to the Middle East before, and I didn't speak Arabic, and I knew very little about what I was doing, but I was willing to volunteer, and that, in the end of the day, seemed to be enough.
And so, on my team, we had folks who, a woman's gym teacher who was going to be the women's empowerment advisor, and folks who had been former turret gunners in the Army, repurposed as sewer and water experts.
We had a couple of people who had a general sense of what they were doing, and they worked very hard, but for the most part, it was a collection of amateurs sort of knocking around on things, given nearly unlimited amounts of money and very little direction, and turned loose.
The second part of your point is, I think, perhaps even more prescient, and that is, would we, could we, have accomplished something if things had been different?
In other words, if we had sent the best people under the best circumstances, sure, we would have done some more good.
We would have done better than we did.
But at the end of the day, we were an occupying army.
If the Chinese army invaded your hometown today and took over and said, well, you know, we've killed off a bunch of your people and we've destroyed most of your city, but don't worry, we're going to rebuild it, let's be friends, you have to admit that no matter how good an effort the Chinese army put in on that, you would never really feel very warm towards them, would you?
Well, you know, something that we were talking about on the show yesterday was the just blatant naked blood for oil imperialism in Bahrain, where our government supports the monarchy there in its brutal torture and crackdown against peaceful dissidents, because that's where we keep our military base.
And that's, then there's plenty of oil and gas interests in Bahrain.
And so our government doesn't really care how many people have to die putting down the rebellion.
We'll turn a blind eye to the Saudis helping and everything else, which makes me, you know, look at the Iraq war in context and think, did you guys ever think of yourselves as maybe just window dressing, that this never really was about winning hearts and minds of the people of Iraq, but telling the American TV audience that don't worry, someone's over there winning their hearts and minds?
This actually was something we could talk about quite a bit.
There were sort of two groups of folks with us.
One, I'd say three, it was a very small group of gung-ho folks that really thought we were out to do something great.
And they were really just a tiny, tiny minority.
Most of the people there just wanted to do their job kind of as best they could, make a little money and go home.
But a number of us, and I include myself in this, came to believe that, in fact, it was nothing but a scam, a Potemkin village that was set up simply so that someone could say, look, we're trying to help, we're rebuilding schools, we're doing all these wonderful things.
And that, in fact, the reason why it failed is because nobody really cared whether it succeeded or not.
The most important thing we could do was simply be there so that when it became politically expedient to point to us and say, look, the nice things we're doing, we're fixing a road or we're giving some food out to kids or something, we were there and handy for that.
When the political expediency expired, they closed the program down.
It's not like we finished the job.
They just basically said earlier this year, well, time to move on, and closed everything down and left things pretty much where we started.
I'd hate to give too much credibility to the Bob Woodward version of events, but it seems like despite all the smoke screens and the spin that all his first-person actors put on their own part in the Iraq war, where it does seem pretty clear, the truth kind of leaking through all that, that as soon as the war started, that no one was in charge of anything.
Everything that Rumsfeld was supposed to be doing, he pointed at Connolese Rice.
Everything Connolese Rice was supposed to do, she pointed at Rumsfeld and Powell and whoever.
And back and forth they went, and no one was really doing anything except down at the local level Douglas Fyfe and Paul Bremer are deciding to disband the army and these kinds of things.
But well, man, and now the music's playing.
We got to go out to break.
That's kind of where I want to pick up when we get back, is whether anybody was really in charge of this thing at all, or whether it was just like a local government job training program run amok, you know?
That kind of thing.
All right, hold it right there.
It's Peter Van Buren, formerly with the U.S. State Department.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Peter Van Buren, formerly with the U.S. State Department, and now author of We Meant Well, about the reconstruction nation-building project in Iraq.
And now, Peter, forgive me, I'm not very well at forming my questions.
I'm not very good at talking or anything.
But I was trying to provoke you into giving us a portrait of some of the Catch-22 type aspect of basically the tragic hilarity of this nation-building project over in Iraq over the last few years.
Sure.
You were talking earlier about, we were talking earlier about the lack of leadership.
And actually, one of the chapters that got cut from the book, but I'm going to put up on my blog, was called Lessons Learned from Iraq.
And the idea was that we're going to repeat this nation-building stuff over and over again.
We're doing it right now in Afghanistan, where we've spent over $70 billion.
And the rumors are that Libya, Yemen, maybe even Syria are on the future screen.
So if we're going to spend all this money and take all this time, one of the lessons learned was the desperate need for adult supervision.
What happened in Iraq was a series of failures.
The Coalitional Provision Authority was one of the first failures to do anything useful rebuilding Iraq.
It got caught up in neocon fantasies of creating flat taxes and super-powered stock markets and things like that.
It crashed and burned.
The Army Corps of Engineers was then handed the bag of money to try to rebuild Iraq.
They got tangled up in their own security issues and their own bureaucracy, and they crashed and burned.
The next step under the Bush administration, of course, was to hand all the money over to KBR and some of those other nice mega-contracting firms and let them rebuild Iraq.
They took the money all right.
They were very efficient at that part, but they didn't really accomplish anything.
So by around 2007, pretty much the only people left in town that hadn't had a shot at it were the Department of State, where I worked, and we were sent in to do this.
The problem was that the state had no vision for it.
They didn't really understand what we were supposed to do, other than we were supposed to spend money and try to make some friends.
The projects that we were asked to do were pretty much left to each person on the ground to kind of conceive.
There were these general lines of effort that we were given, such as women or agriculture or widows, which is the same as women, but it counted as a second one anyway.
We were sort of left to make something up to go along with that.
It reminded me a lot of when I was a little kid doing Boy Scout merit badges.
You know, if you're going to get your knot-tying merit badge, you had to learn to tie four or five knots, and it didn't really matter which four or five or whether you remembered them later or not.
You know, you tied the knots and you got patted on the head, and that's what we were off doing.
So we'd get these urgent requests that we'd need to do something about women, and because we had no time to really plan anything thoughtful, because there was no appetite for any kind of long-term development, we would throw something together, oftentimes a conference where we'd get a speaker to say, you know, women, be empowered, put on miniskirts, go out and open businesses or something.
And the only way we could actually get people to show up was by giving away a meal and taxi fare.
We could usually get a crowd for that.
There was no connection between the things that one PRT was doing and what the neighboring PRTs were doing.
One organization might have an arts counselor with them, and so they put on plays and funded local artists.
Meanwhile, the next town over, there was no arts counselor, but they had a water guy, so they tried to do a little work on water systems.
We didn't talk to each other.
There was no overall guidance for this.
In many ways, we were sort of discouraged from communicating with each other.
People were very jealous of their successes and wanted to make it seem like they themselves were winning the war.
An awful lot of what we did, I think, was driven by yearly performance reviews, the desire of people to be patted on the head, have their project pinned up on the refrigerator by mom or maybe Condi, who knows.
And you ended up with this haphazard thing.
One of the analogies that maybe works best is the old one about a hundred monkeys that a hundred typewriters typing for a hundred years might accidentally pound out some Shakespeare.
And that's sort of what we were doing.
Everyone just kind of went off and did their thing, and every once in a while we'd look at it and say, nope, no Shakespeare yet, better keep going.
And 63 billion dollars and eight years later, we shut the typewriters down and went home.
So in other words, the military and the State Department, the Empire, is just another government program, and it works just about as well as any of the others.
Well, we like to think we could have done better if we had in fact been asked to run a PRT program in maybe Detroit or New Orleans.
The idea was that we were over there in Iraq, spending all this money, giving it away to the thugs and thieves and carpetbaggers that came out of the woodwork to take our money.
And we couldn't help but thinking, boy, if we only were spending this back at home.
My sister is a public school teacher, and I would go out to work in Iraq and we'd hand out $5,000 micro-grants, we called them, and these were basically $5,000 cash to an Iraqi so that he could start a small business.
Here you go, here's your money, good luck.
You know, if you want to let us know how it works out, that's cool, but if not, good luck with that.
And the theory was that businesses would pop up.
And I'd come home and I'd check emails from my sister where her school library couldn't afford magazine subscriptions.
I'd watch the news and realize that America couldn't pay its fire departments or rebuild its bridges.
And we were all stuck thinking that if only this had been taking place in the United States, we might actually have done some good for our country.
Instead, we really just wasted that money.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, contrary to the commercials that say that this is the path to a professional salary in life, the soldiers come home from the Iraq war and they're unemployed.
There's an irony here that it's just, there's too much of it.
It's almost as if we've overdosed on irony and can't possibly absorb any more.
That's not funny anymore.
It's not even funny.
You're right.
I mean, we had soldiers, at one point in time, we had $100,000 in cash in a safe in my office.
And, you know, there are soldiers who are making, you know, barely over minimum wage.
Their families are taking food stamps back home to get by.
And we're sitting there counting out $20,000 into piles so that we can give it out later to Iraqis who probably would just as soon see us leave, if not kill us, had they had the chance.
But it was a crazy, crazy situation where you turn one way and there were unlimited amounts of money being hemorrhaged out for no purpose.
You turn the other way and you saw back in America where even small amounts of money could have done a lot of good, created jobs for some of the soldiers when they went back, fixed some things up in America to make life here a little bit better.
And instead, we wasted it all out in the desert.
It was very frustrating to me personally.
Well, and, you know, you talked about the lack of coordination between you and the other teams at the other provincial reconstruction bases and all this, but what about the Iraqi government?
Did you interact with them at all?
The Iraqi government?
Let me think if I ever ran into them.
I heard of them.
I really heard of them.
No, no, I'm not kidding.
I heard of them, but I...
One of those parties at the bar in the Green Zone.
Yeah, that might have been where I heard of it.
The Iraqi government existed largely in our imaginations.
The United States, while we held a number of elections, we saw those wonderful pictures of the Purple Thumbs, never held local elections, and so in the small towns and rural areas where I spent a lot of my time, there was no government.
The power vacuum that the United States created when we deposed Saddam in 2003 was never filled by any governmental organizations.
Local power brokers took over, particularly tribal sheikhs.
These guys were like mafia dons.
They ruled through extended families.
They had a violent side to them that they could display when necessary.
They did benevolent acts to win some friends.
If there were widows in the area, they'd give them some charity.
If there were somebody else in the area trying to cut in on their business, they'd whack them.
These are the people we ended up doing business with, because there was no Iraqi government outside of a few major cities.
Now they're talking about keeping troops past the 2011 deadline.
Do you think that Maliki and his army still need Americans to keep them in power in Baghdad?
What they need is American money, and they'd like to have that.
If they have to tolerate a few thousand American soldiers around to get the money bags, I suspect they will.
Maliki right now has consolidated his power quite effectively.
He retains control of both the defense and the interior ministries, the two most powerful parts of the central Iraqi government.
He retains control of personal militias, many of which have been linked to alleged secret prisons and alleged torture.
He doesn't need the Americans to keep him in power anymore.
What he does like is the flow of cash and some of the weapons that we're planning to give, slash, transfer, slash, sell to him.
So he's a smart guy.
He's played a little poker in his life, and if he needs to keep a few thousand American soldiers in the neighborhood to get all those benefits, sure.
That's a small price to pay for all the money and goods he's going to rake in.
All right, well, I'm sorry we're all out of time, but I suggest people put aside the time to read We Meant Well by Peter Van Buren.
It really is a very interesting book.
It's funny.
It's well-written.
It's got a great personal narrative here, and check out his archive at Tom Dispatch and under Tom's name at Antiwar.com as well.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Looking forward to talking to you again.
