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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 Iraq—a 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 cafés 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 surge—that 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 writer—and readers—appalled and disillusioned but wiser.
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