| We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (American Empire Project) |  | Author: Peter Van Buren
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Sales Rank: 37,183
Languages: English (Unknown), English (Original Language), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.9 x 1
ISBN: 0805094369
EAN: 9780805094367
ASIN: 0805094369
Publication Date: September 27, 2011
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From a State Department insider, the first account of our blundering efforts to rebuild Iraq--a shocking and rollicking true-life tale of Americans abroad
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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