The Foreign Service Journal, January 2012

66 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 1 B O O K S bedded Provincial Reconstruction Team that Van Buren led built a fac- tory that produced chicken at more than twice the current market value in the area. It doesn’t take a degree in economics to predict that the project would fail, no matter how delicious the chicken and how hard the ePRT tried to keep it going. And by the end of the book, it seems clear that a good chunk of the $63 billion U.S. investment in Iraq has been squandered on a series of tremendous screw-ups. And there’s the rub: How did things get so ridiculously out of whack? Van Buren lays out his 41 episodic chapters in an almost self-therapeutic style, as a way of explaining how he be- came an accomplice in wasting billions of dollars in Iraq. True to its subtitle ( How I Helped Lose the Battle …), the book demands the reader’s admiration because the author is willing to admit he had a hand in the mess. But the truly brave thing would have been to choose the hard right over the easy wrong in the beginning and not have a need to tell this story in the first place. Perhaps mindful of this on some level, he casts his tale as part of the long, venerable Foreign Service tradi- tion of constructive dissent spotlighted in the FSJ ’s July-August 2011 issue. Unfortunately, this claim rings hollow because his dissent comes after the fact, and lacks sincerity. He is also making money from the venture, which (not coincidentally) is a primary motivation he cites for his and many others deploying to Iraq. Rather than frivolously passing the time of his yearlong deployment (or, as he describes it, forced service) and then writing a memoir about the situ- ation, Van Buren should have been doing the hard work of putting things right in his corner of the world, at least to the extent he and his six-person team could. But he does at least pro- vide some 60 citations for anyone wanting to go back and look up the re- ports on some of these silly projects. To be fair, he rightly notes that ex- amples of professional incompetence were systemic. Military and civilian personnel, contractors and lifelong civil servants, and politicians and policy- makers all got their hands dirty. Per- haps Van Buren finds solace by pointing the finger at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — but when there’s one finger pointing out, three others are pointing in. Yet failure was not inevitable. Many of the U.S. failings in Iraq were a re- sult of poor planning, strategic misdi- rection, inadequate staffing and, yes, ineptitude. And some did, indeed, come from the top. But many started at the micro level, because individuals in the field blindly agreed to carry out a mission without thinking through its practical aspects. Simply put, there was not enough con- structive dissent before the fact. It once was rare for the State De- partment and the military to interact outside of the embassy. But in the post-9/11 era, the two entities must work together in a much more efficient and productive manner. For example, whenever the military has deployed civil affairs teams, as it did in Iraq, PRTs should not merely replicate that function. Rather, the two institutions’ approaches should be complementary, but remain distinct. While it appears Van Buren had a good relationship with the civil affairs team in his part of the country, whether he made any distinction between the work of the two entities is not clear. Regardless of these shortcomings, however, everyone should read this book for the lessons it offers. Study it as a manual of “what not to do” at every level, then use those examples to po- lice your own ranks. Fix what you can fix, and do your due diligence as part of the oath you swore to uphold. And above all, don’t anybody pull another Van Buren! Marcus Hunter is a U.S. Army major and Special Forces officer who has de- ployed to countries in the Middle East, South America and the Caribbean. He is currently studying defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. The Lessons of Vietnam Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb, Brookings Institution Press, 2011, $29.95, hardback, 355 pages; $9.88, Kindle Edition. R EVIEWED BY A URELIUS F ERNANDEZ Journalist-scholar Marvin Kalb and his daughter, freelance journalist Deb- orah Kalb, have collaborated on this Study We Meant Well as a manual of “what not to do” at every level.