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We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People

          
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About the Book

"One diplomat's darkly humorous and ultimately scathing assault on just about everything the military and State Department have done--or tried to do--since the invasion of Iraq. The title says it all."--The New York Times

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 that lack water and electricity?

As Peter Van Buren shows, 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.

A work of "scathing, gallows humor" (The Boston Globe), 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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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9780805096811
  • Publisher: Metropolitan Books
  • Publisher Imprint: Metropolitan Books
  • Depth: 25
  • Language: English
  • Returnable: N
  • Spine Width: 20 mm
  • Weight: 353 gr
  • ISBN-10: 0805096817
  • Publisher Date: 21 Aug 2012
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Height: 210 mm
  • No of Pages: 269
  • Series Title: American Empire Project
  • Sub Title: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
  • Width: 141 mm


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