AMERICANS JUST CAN'T DO THIS STUFF

We can offer disaster aid but we just can't rebuild a country.   The Bush-era follies in Iraq continued into the Obama Administration:

Author Exposes U.S. Gov’t Cluelessness, Gets Persecuted by U.S. Gov’t
by Greer Mansfield
4:30 pm October 6, 2011
WONKETTE

Van Buren is a Foreign Service officer who spent a year in Iraq (2009-2010) heading two “reconstruction teams” assigned to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure and “win hearts and minds.” What Van Buren saw in Iraq during the “civilian surge,” however, was mostly waste, futility, and criminal insanity.

Just a few examples: a truckload of classic American books translated into Arabic that end up being dumped behind a Baghdad school (their purpose was to teach Iraqi children “basic literacy skills,” but they were apparently unreadable); the expensive construction of a milk-processing plant in the middle of the desert far from people or dairies; programs to make Iraqi women dress more like American women, etc. In the midst these schemes, no one thinks to attend to basic necessities like water, sewage, and electricity.

I would love to know who this is...

Van Buren has to endure several mind-numbing meetings with clueless administrators, advisers, policy wonks, and military brass. The cast of characters at a meeting with “fellows” from a “prominent national security think tank” includes an unnamed neoconservative journalist:

He liked military high tech; he used words like awesome, superb, and extraordinary (pronounced EXTRAordinary) without irony to describe tanks and guns. He said in reference to the Israeli Army, “they give me a hard-on.”

You can get the book here:

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren, Metropolitan Books, 288 pages, $15.67