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How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
Metropolitan Books
October 2011
On Sale: September 27, 2011
288 pages
ISBN: 0805094369
EAN: 9780805094367
Kindle: B004ULOJA2
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
From a State Department insider, the first book recounting our misguided efforts to rebuild Iraqβa shocking and rollicking true-life cross between Catch-22 and The Ugly American Charged with rebuilding Iraq, would you spend taxpayer money on a sports mural in Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhood to promote reconciliation through art? How about an isolated milk factory that cannot get its milk to market? Or a pastry class training women to open cafΓ©s on bombed-out streets without water or electricity? According to Peter Van Buren, we bought all these projects and more in the most expensive hearts-and-minds campaign since the Marshall Plan. We Meant Well is his eyewitness account of the civilian side of the surgeβthat surreal and bollixed attempt to defeat terrorism and win over Iraqis by reconstructing the world we had just destroyed. Leading a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team on its quixotic mission, Van Buren details, with laser-like irony, his yearlong encounter with pointless projects, bureaucratic fumbling, overwhelmed soldiers, and oblivious administrators secluded in the world's largest embassy, who fail to realize that you can't rebuild a country without first picking up the trash. Darkly funny while deadly serious, We Meant Well is a tragicomic voyage of ineptitude and corruption that leaves its writerβand readersβappalled and disillusioned but wiser.
 Media BuzzWeekend Edition Saturday - October 1, 2011
Fresh Air - NPR - September 26, 2011
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