- Van Buren, Peter.
We Meant Well.
New York: Henry Holt, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-8050-9436-7.
-
The author is a career Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. State
Department. In 2009–2010 he spent a year in Iraq as
leader of two embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams (ePRT)
operating out of Forward Operating Bases (FOB) which were basically
crusader forts in a hostile Iraqi wilderness: America inside,
trouble outside. Unlike “fobbits” who rarely ventured
off base, the author and his team were charged with engaging the
local population to carry out “Lines of Effort” dreamed up
by pointy-heads back at the palatial embassy in Baghdad or in Washington
to the end of winning the “hearts and minds” of the
population and “nation building”. The Iraqis were so
appreciative of these efforts that they regularly attacked the FOB
with mortar fire and mounted improvised explosive device (IED)
and sniper attacks on those who ventured out beyond the wire.
If the whole thing were not so tawdry and tragic, the recounting
of the author's experiences would be hilariously funny. If you
imagine it to be a Waugh novel and read it with a dark sense of humour,
it is wickedly amusing, but then one remembers that real people
are dying and suffering grievous injuries, the Iraqi population
are being treated as props in public relation stunts by the
occupiers and deprived of any hope of bettering themselves, and
all of this vast fraudulent squandering of resources is being
paid for by long-suffering U.S. taxpayers or money
borrowed from China and Japan, further steering the imperial power
toward a debt end.
The story is told in brief chapters, each recounting a specific incident
or aspect of life in Iraq. The common thread, which stretches back over
millennia, is that imperial powers attempting to do good by those
they subjugate will always find themselves outwitted by wily oriental
gentlemen whose ancestors have spent millennia learning how to game
the systems imposed by the despotisms under which they have lived. As
a result, the millions poured down the rathole of “Provincial
Reconstruction” predictably flows into the pockets of the
bosses in the communities who set up front organisations for whatever
harebrained schemes the occupiers dream up. As long as the “project”
results in a ribbon-cutting ceremony covered by the press (who may, of
course, be given an incentive to show up by being paid) and an
impressive PowerPoint presentation for the FOB commander to help
him toward his next promotion, it's deemed a success and, hey,
there's a new Line of Effort from the embassy that demands
another project: let's teach widows beekeeping (p. 137)—it'll
only cost US$1600 per person, and each widow can expect to make
US$200 a year from the honey—what a deal!
The author is clearly a creature of the Foreign Service and scarcely conceals
his scorn for the military who are tasked with keeping him alive in a war
zone and the politicians who define the tasks he is charged with carrying
out. Still, the raw folly of “nation building” and the
obdurate somnambulant stupidity of those who believe that building milk
processing plants or putting on art exhibitions in a war zone will quickly
convert people none of whom have a single ancestor who has ever lived in
a consensually-governed society with the rule of law to model citizens
in a year or two is stunningly evident.
Why are empires always so dumb? When they attain a certain stage of overreach,
they seem to always assume they can instill their own unique culture in those
they conquer. And yet, as
Kipling wrote in 1899:
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
When will policy makers become as wise as the mindless mechanisms of
biology? When an irritant invades an organism and it can't
be eliminated, the usual reaction is to surround it with an inert
barrier which keeps it from causing further harm. “Nation
building” is folly; far better to bomb them if they
misbehave, then build a wall around the whole godforsaken place
and bomb them again if any of them get out and cause any further
mischief. Call it “biomimetic foreign policy”—encyst
upon it!
March 2012 