Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, How the American Taxpayer Got Plucked in Iraq
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today’s twisted treat for you is a slightly adapted chapter from Peter Van Buren’s new book,
We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. I’m sure you remember Van Buren. Last Tuesday, he wrote a vivid first-person
piece for this site, perhaps the first by a government truth-teller, on
what it’s like to be harried by the government you’ve served for 23
years. It can be read by
clicking here or you can catch him discussing it
here. (Or you can listen to him talk about his book and experience in Iraq on Fresh Air by clicking
here.)
Keep in mind that the offer I made then -- your own signed, personalized copy of Van Buren’s remarkable book in return for a $100 contribution to TomDispatch -- is still open, and your contributions, believe me, are deeply appreciated! To get your book or find out more, click here. Those of you who already gave, please be patient. There was such a run on the book that we weren’t able to get our expected shipment. It will be in soon and I hope the books will be winging their way toward you by week’s end.
What follows is a favorite excerpt of mine from Van Buren's new book. Like nothing else I’ve read, it catches the particular madness of the American occupation and “reconstruction” of Iraq. And here’s a rarity at this site: I thought it made sense to ask Van Buren himself to introduce the excerpt and he’s done so in his own inimitable fashion. Tom]
Who doesn’t like roasted chicken? Fresh, crispy with a little salt, it falls off the bone into your mouth. It’s a great thing, unless the price is $2.5 million of your tax dollars.
As a Foreign Service Officer with a 20-year career in the State Department, and as part of the George W. Obama global wars of terror, I was sent to play a small part in the largest nation-building project since the post-World War II Marshall Plan: the reconstruction of Iraq following the American invasion of 2003. My contractor colleagues and I were told to spend money, lots of money, to rebuild water and sewage systems, fix up schools, and most of all, create an economic base so wonderful that Iraqis would turn away from terrorism for a shot at capitalism. Shopping bags full of affirmation would displace suicide vests.
Through a process amply illustrated below, in my neck of rural Iraq all this lofty sounding idealism translated into putting millions of dollars into building a chicken-processing plant. It would, so the thinking went, push aside the live-chickens-in-the-marketplace system that Iraqis had used for 5,000 years, including 4,992 years without either the Americans or al-Qaeda around. It did not work, for all sorts of reasons illustrated in the story below. We did have great ambitions, however, and even made a video to celebrate opening day. Don't miss the sign at the very the beginning thanking us Americans for "the rehabilitation of [the] massacre of poultry." We sure paid for the sign, but the quality of the proofreading gives you an idea of how much thought went into the whole affair.
If the old saying that there is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action is true, you should be terrified after reading this excerpt from my new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. And keep in mind that it all happened on your dime. What follows catches my experience of what was blithely called “reconstruction” in post-invasion Iraq. I can assure you of one thing: the State Department isn’t exactly thrilled with my version of their operations in Iraq -- and they’ve acted accordingly when it comes to me (something you can read about by clicking here). For this excerpt, I suggest adding only a little salt. Peter Van Buren
Keep in mind that the offer I made then -- your own signed, personalized copy of Van Buren’s remarkable book in return for a $100 contribution to TomDispatch -- is still open, and your contributions, believe me, are deeply appreciated! To get your book or find out more, click here. Those of you who already gave, please be patient. There was such a run on the book that we weren’t able to get our expected shipment. It will be in soon and I hope the books will be winging their way toward you by week’s end.
What follows is a favorite excerpt of mine from Van Buren's new book. Like nothing else I’ve read, it catches the particular madness of the American occupation and “reconstruction” of Iraq. And here’s a rarity at this site: I thought it made sense to ask Van Buren himself to introduce the excerpt and he’s done so in his own inimitable fashion. Tom]
Who doesn’t like roasted chicken? Fresh, crispy with a little salt, it falls off the bone into your mouth. It’s a great thing, unless the price is $2.5 million of your tax dollars.
As a Foreign Service Officer with a 20-year career in the State Department, and as part of the George W. Obama global wars of terror, I was sent to play a small part in the largest nation-building project since the post-World War II Marshall Plan: the reconstruction of Iraq following the American invasion of 2003. My contractor colleagues and I were told to spend money, lots of money, to rebuild water and sewage systems, fix up schools, and most of all, create an economic base so wonderful that Iraqis would turn away from terrorism for a shot at capitalism. Shopping bags full of affirmation would displace suicide vests.
Through a process amply illustrated below, in my neck of rural Iraq all this lofty sounding idealism translated into putting millions of dollars into building a chicken-processing plant. It would, so the thinking went, push aside the live-chickens-in-the-marketplace system that Iraqis had used for 5,000 years, including 4,992 years without either the Americans or al-Qaeda around. It did not work, for all sorts of reasons illustrated in the story below. We did have great ambitions, however, and even made a video to celebrate opening day. Don't miss the sign at the very the beginning thanking us Americans for "the rehabilitation of [the] massacre of poultry." We sure paid for the sign, but the quality of the proofreading gives you an idea of how much thought went into the whole affair.
If the old saying that there is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action is true, you should be terrified after reading this excerpt from my new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. And keep in mind that it all happened on your dime. What follows catches my experience of what was blithely called “reconstruction” in post-invasion Iraq. I can assure you of one thing: the State Department isn’t exactly thrilled with my version of their operations in Iraq -- and they’ve acted accordingly when it comes to me (something you can read about by clicking here). For this excerpt, I suggest adding only a little salt. Peter Van Buren
Chickening Out in Iraq
How Your Tax Dollars Financed “Reconstruction” Madness in the Middle East
By Peter Van Buren
Very few people outside the agricultural world know that if the rooster in a flock dies the hens will continue to produce fertile eggs for up to four weeks because “sperm nests,” located in the ovary ducts of hens, collect and store sperm as a survival mechanism to ensure fertile eggs even after the male is gone. I had to know this as part of my role in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Like learning that Baghdad produced 8,000 tons of trash every day, who could have imagined when we invaded Iraq that such information would be important to the Global War on Terror? If I were to meet George W., I would tell him this by way of suggesting that he did not know what he was getting the country into.
I would also invite the former president along to visit a chicken-processing plant built with your tax dollars and overseen by my ePRT (embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team). We really bought into the chicken idea and spent like drunken sailors on shore leave to prove it. In this case, the price was $2.58 million for the facility.
The first indication this was all chicken shit was the smell as we arrived at the plant with a group of Embassy friends on a field trip. The odor that greeted us when we walked into what should have been the chicken-killing fields of Iraq was fresh paint. There was no evidence of chicken killing as we walked past a line of refrigerated coolers.
When we opened one fridge door, expecting to see chickens chilling, we found instead old buckets of paint. Our guide quickly noted that the plant had purchased 25 chickens that morning specifically to kill for us and to feature in a video on the glories of the new plant. This was good news, a 100% jump in productivity from previous days, when the plant killed no chickens at all.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
