In 2012 Peter Van Buren, an ex-employee of the US State Department, published “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People”. The book describes Van Buren’s year-long assignment in Iraq in 2009 to 2010. That was the year that culminated in the chaotic and utterly wasteful but necessary withdrawal of the feckless and exhausted US military forces in 2011, a tragicomic skedaddle out of a disastrous failure that should have ended the war and the occupation but tragically did not.
This book is the kind of eye witness to history I love and it deeply informs my take on the foreign policy of the US government as the disastrous consequences of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq continue to play out and spiral ever downward both in foreign parts and at home in the disintegrating cities and towns of America rotting from the exhaustion that corruption creates.
Peter Van Buren in 2012:
“The reconstruction of Iraq was the largest nation-building program in history, dwarfing in size, cost and complexity even those undertaken after World War II to reconstruct Germany and Japan. At a cost to the US taxpayer of over $63 billion and counting, the program was lavishly funded, yet, as government inspectors found, the efforts were characterized from the beginning by pervasive waste and inefficiency, mistaken judgements, flawed policies and structural weakness. Of those thousands of acts of waste and hundreds of mistaken judgements some portion was made by me and the two reconstruction teams I led in Iraq, along with my good-willed but overwhelmed and unprepared colleagues in the State Department, the military and dozens of other US government agencies. We were the ones who famously helped paste together feathers year after year hoping for a duck. The scholarly history that someone will one day write about Iraq and reconstruction will need the raw material of failure, and so this war story will try to explain how it all went so wrong…
Along with a half-dozen contractors as teammates, I was assigned to rebuild Iraq’s essential services, to supply water and sewer access as part of a counter-insurgency struggle to win over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. It was Vietnam, only better this time around … I was to create projects that would lift the local economy… I was also to empower women… a robust consumer society would do the trick, shopping bags of affirmation leading to democracy…”
The opening paragraph of bumph heading this Amazon publication supplies some colourful details:
"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 that lack water and electricity? … A work of "scathing, gallows humor" (The Boston Globe), We Meant Well is a tragicomic voyage of ineptitude and corruption that leaves its writer―and readers―appalled and disillusioned, but wiser.”
Sun Tsu said it 2500 years ago: prolonged war destroys the government, the army, the society that attempts to wage it. And now the hitherto most powerful, prosperous and dominant country on earth is proving Sun Tsu right.
America is dying as the corrupt power brokers in and around the US government, fed fat on the criminality of the last 20 years in the Middle East, now batten on the exhausted USA and turn the homeland into another failed state. The inner cities of America are looking more like the bombed out, gang ridden neighbourhoods of Baghdad every day. What was the heart of corruption in Afghanistan and Iraq, traffic by government employees and even military people in stolen national wealth, narcotics, guns and, yes, even children, is now the not-so-secret disease eating the homeland alive today. LA, New York City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Cleveland, all of the major US cities today are being murdered by drugs and corruption and the vilest imaginable moral depravity at the highest levels of government; America is falling apart.
The weakness of America created especially over the last 20 years is finally revealing itself internationally and that’s what worries me as a Canadian because it is creating the potential for a nuclear confrontation.
The potential for such a disaster must be countered by diplomacy and that means a strong US State Department headed by an experienced diplomat employing US ambassadors. But the underfunding and waste of State Department resources that Peter Van Buren observed in Iraq has only gotten worse.
In 2010, as Van Buren testifies, foreign services jobs were going begging as the State Department gave way to the Pentagon in the contest for taxpayer dollars; American Ambassadors were becoming more irrelevant as US four-star generals took over their prestige and influence. When Mike Pompeo was appointed Secretary of State the State Department was taken over by the head of the CIA, not even a chain of command general but a prosecutor of covert destabilization, a war monger by trade. It was an ominous change.
In 2017 there were 1200 US diplomatic staff in Moscow. Four years later there are 120. Washington has embarked on a program of hostility to Russia by expelling Russian diplomatic staff and their families and Russia is retaliating. US diplomatic staff and their families who have been in Russia for three years or more are ordered to leave Moscow by the end of January 2022. US consulates all over Russia have been ordered to be closed because of lack of funding from Washington. Washington is blinding itself.
RT reports today:
"Earlier this year, citing limits on hiring local staff, the US Embassy in Moscow stopped processing non-diplomatic visas and listed Russians as “homeless nationalities,”essentially forcing immigrant visa applicants to travel to third countries, such as Poland.”
Limits on hiring local people? Deliberately ordered limits or simply the denial of funding? Whatever the reasons, diplomacy is being blinded. The two nuclear superpowers are arranging themselves into a pre-war configuration as warriors, geriatric cold warriors, infest the State Department.
Russia is claiming that over 100,000 Ukrainian army forces, supplied with expensive US high tech weapons, are massing now just west of the Donbas area, the break-away republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. Kiev pleads innocent and charges that it is Russian forces that are massing on the border preparing to invade Ukraine. Kiev has asked for NATO membership and the stationing of US/NATO missiles on Ukraine and has declared that foreign military forces will be welcome to come and defend Ukraine from Russia.
The Russian government is desperately emphasizing that that would constitute an existential threat to Russia that could not possibly be tolerated without a military response. The lesson they taught NATO in 2008 when Georgia tried to establish NATO power at the expense of the ethnically Russian semi-autonomous districts of Abkhazia and South Ossetia looks to be in need of repetition in Ukraine.
Meanwhile there is talk in Washington and Poland of stationing NATO nuclear missiles in Poland. This is insane by any measure. During the Cold War there was lively mutual diplomacy and the heads of both the USA and the USSR met in person to help prevent a nuclear disaster; arms limitation treaties were signed and adhered to. What happened to the sane people who used to be seen in Washington then?
The obvious senility of Joe Biden seems to be spreading faster than any virus. A brain dead Washington in charge of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal? A Washington seething with parasites hungry for arms appropriations, now that the withdrawal of the exhausted US military from Afghanistan has cut into their sources of corrupt profits? Is that the situation we see today? When the brain dies the body’s separate parts disconnect and die and that is true of nations as well as individuals. What dead-headed, blind and deluded factions are now fighting over the US nuclear arsenal?
When the USSR dissolved in 1991 there was fear in the West that the feeble Russian government would lose control of their nuclear arsenal. The 1990s was a decade of horror in Russia; then, 20 years ago Vladimir Putin became leader and the nation is now prosperous and stable and even a near competitor of the US militarily as well as economically. In 20 years Russia has progressed while the USA has stagnated and now finally is visibly regressing.
Thirty years after the USSR collapsed the USA looks like it’s ready to enter its own terrible decade of chaos. Will the world survive that disaster? Will I see catastrophe even before I die of old age in ten years or so? Will the former Constitutional Republic of the United States be replaced by a blind and deluded military junta? Which would be the greater disaster, the breakup of America or its continued existence as the helpless feeding trough of a totalitarian dictatorship addicted to permanent war?