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

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Hoopla Extract Information

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(
    [year] => 2011
    [artist] => Peter Van Buren
    [fiction] => 
    [coverImageUrl] => https://cover.hoopladigital.com/mcm_9781429995238_270.jpeg
    [titleId] => 13990276
    [isbn] => 9781429995238
    [abridged] => 
    [language] => ENGLISH
    [profanity] => 
    [title] => We Meant Well
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    [pages] => 288
    [children] => 
    [artists] => Array
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                    [name] => Peter Van Buren
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            [0] => Diplomacy
            [1] => History
            [2] => International Relations
            [3] => Iraq War (2003-2011)
            [4] => Military
            [5] => Political Science
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    [price] => 1.2
    [id] => 13990276
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    [kind] => EBOOK
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    [upc] => 
    [synopsis] => 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.
    [url] => https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/13990276
    [pa] => 
    [subtitle] => How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
    [publisher] => Henry Holt and Co.
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