The Foreign Service Journal, January 2012

that most soldiers are good at what they do and useful to have around. And in his view, nearly all contractors in Iraq, from the 3161s working for State and other government agencies to the hundreds of thousands in the private sector, are greedy opportunists who don’t deliver the services they were paid to provide. It is unfortunate that the author re- sorts to such one-size-fits-all assess- ments, instead of letting the facts — which are quite damning — speak for themselves. Yet it would be an even greater shame if the flaws in the mes- senger’s delivery were to obscure the important truth of his message. For even if one agrees that “we meant well” in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the massive collateral damage we inflicted — and suffered — in the process should give future administra- tions real pause before committing a similar folly. Steven Alan Honley was a Foreign Service officer from 1985 to 1997, serving in Mexico City, Wellington and Washington, D.C. He has been editor of the Foreign Service Journal since 2001. Unconstructive Dissent R EVIEWED BY M ARCUS H UNTER Regardless of whether you have ex- perienced the war in Iraq (or Afghanistan) in all of its ugliness, Peter Van Buren’s account of his year there will give you some laughs. (Watch par- ticularly for his parenthetical asides, where he wields much of his biting sar- casm.) The stories are absurd to the point of hilarity, especially when you consider these are real events. To take just one example, the em- B O O K S J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 65