A lot of people seem to think that anything short of perfection is failure, but your article shows how good people made a difference over there. Thanks.

I need to rant: when I hear about people like van Buren, it makes an already dreary day in the northern latitudes even drearier for me. . .The hell you say the guy actually admitted he himself caused more damage than anyone he saw or heard of (did I read that right)?

Additionally, I recognize that Clausewitz did say the defense is a stronger form of warfare than offense, but I’m not sure he had it in mind that is was good defense to saturate an area with lots of PRTs so failures like the van Burens didn’t pull down the whole mission.

Well, for all that did a good job in Iraq shoveling sand against the tide, a tip of the hat. However, for the pin striped FSO van Buren set, all I will say is, that's what abandoned deep wells are for.

I'm having a hard time attempting to understand why Peter van Buren is being thrown under the bus. Mr Donnelly seems to confirm how the factors of personnel, civilian and military unit shifts, Iraqis reading different sheets of music and tons of cash thrown to the winds makes the whole reconstruction effort a sick joke to all concerned, especially the US taxpayer.

Is this a "shoot the messenger" exercise. Discrace the whistle blower?

The Iraq Experience absolutely sucked, people. Why bicker over the small guy who attempted to perform the ridiculously impossible.

Cheney is smirking at you.

Rotation, Rotation, Rotation.

It's remarkable how durable the rotation system has been under the pressure of wartime, and in the face of well-known and widely discussed negative outcomes of that system.

Good, informative article.

Like many former PRT people, you chose to take my book/comments personally. The title of the book, We Meant Well, was supposed to take care of that-- most everyone had good intentions. I know you worked hard, did your best, and made a difference, blah blah blah.

Despite the fact that you confirm most of my points, I must concede that you are right.

Iraq today is a splendid place, a vital part of the world economy, a stable society, a nation where water, sewage, electricity and health care are available to most citizens. The oil flows, al Qaeda is vanquished, Sunni and Shia meet on eHarmony.com and rainbows and unicorns dance gaily along the Tigris.

Sorry buddy. It did not work. Eight years and $63 billion later, we did not reconstruct Iraq. If you still think you are right, please plan your next vacation for Basra or Ramadi or Sadr City. Hotels are a bargain! Invest your 401(k) in an Iraqi business.

As for pinstripes, please, those went out of fashion with the Hoover administration. At least find another way to make fun of me personally (I suggest bald and fat) without such tired cliches.

See you in Baghdad for Spring Break!

Peter

www.wemeantwell.com

but, based on Mr. Van Buren's published comments and articles on the net, he raises many of the same points Mr. Donnelly alluded to here.

Don't expect this narrative to change the mind of most non-interventionists. Indeed, what is described here isn't very shocking or revealing, although related in a very engaging manner.

As Steve358 points out, this was failure on a strategic level. This is Big Picture epic fail. No matter how many professionals are discussing tactics and "getting it," it all comes back to strategy. Contra the old saw, strategy no less than tactics should be the realm of professionals, otherwise you get epic boondoggles and tragedies.

But we can't blame the Bush Administration entirely. They were acting on assumptions that underly our foreign policy. We reject cultural determinism to our loss: universal values, differences are only skin deep, everyone wants the same things, things worked out in Japan and Germany, why not elsewhere, etc. When reality finally dawned on people that Afghanistan and Iraq are not postwar Germany or Japan, the response was, "well, we weren't expecting Switzerland overnight or it's all those perfidious Pakistanis and/or Iranians." So many still can't entirely reject the Universalist assumptions that have proven so dangerous, there has to be another explanation for failure, hence the few rotten apples meme.

The more long-lasting colonial operations like the Brits and Russians took a very different tact. People were deployed for lifetimes. There was also the realization that they were dealing with alien cultures.

Zathras alludes to rotation. Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn't theshort-term rotation been a long-standing policy? Isn't said rotation based on the assumption that fo's should be generalists, being based on this notion that with a little tweaking, Americans should be able to work in any environment?

I echo the comments of Steve358 and LMT. The assumptions regarding Iraqi development/reconstructuion and the PRT strategy were as flawed as any of the assumptions and strategies that came before an after. My sense was that GOI had very little knowledge or brief on the PRT's, and likely opposed the idea (at least in private) because governing in Iraq is all about top-down. Just because General Odierno says the local or provincial council is important does not make it a lasting reality.

Also worth noting that Iraqis seldom figure into these stories about Americans coming to help. If anyone bothered to check, they'd discover lots of Iraqis know how to do simple or complicated things (more complicated than salting a poultry plant with chickens). Problem was that not enough of these Iraqi experts were in positions of authority and they did not have access to resources or staff to make things happen.

For example, Terry Barnich, Mageg Hussein, and CDR Wolf were killed by an IED as they were returning from the Fallujah Waste Water Treatment Plant project. If ever there was the poster child for flawed project, it would be the FWWTP. All sorts of wrong assumptions and missed details for that mess. In my opinion,dying for that abomination was not worth it.

A common thread for all of this was/is a U.S. official in a position of authority making statements of certainty that later prove to be wrong, or mostly wrong:

...iraq has an active WMD program
...America and the Middle East are safer without Saddam
...U.S. forces will be greeted with flowers and sweets
...oil revenues will cover the costs
...capturing Saddam will ice this insurgency problem
...we can cow the Iraqis into cooperating
...arresting all the military-age males will make things better
...foreign fighters are the problem
...as they stand up, we'll stand down
...secure the Iraqis and give GOI time to achieve political reconciliation
...work on the development and governance at the local level, since bottom-up will work in Iraq, or that's how Iraq should work
...we need to have a robust presence to secure our gains and keep Iraq stable
...and so on

As of 2011 how can anyone believe anything uttered by a high-ranking national security official or a flag-ranked officer? All of this hooha for the past decade has been trying to impose ideology and wishes on a pretty messed up reality that should not have occurred. It's the American version of Potemkin villages or Soviet objective reality. The Iraqis had the USG's number soon after Saddam's statue came down, so their best and adopted course-of-action was to tolerate the occupiers, position themselves for the post-occupier era, and look out for opportunities to collect some $$$$$.

Please remember that the premise of The Surge was to buy time for political reconcilation, and the premise of the PRT's was to apply a civilian face and character to development and reconstruction. Careful review of what happened would suggest that The Surge did not lead to political reconciliation, and the heavy-lifting of development and reconstruction remained with the military. The Surge might have blunted the continuation of a civil war and ethnic cleansing, but it did not achieve the stated goal. Likewise, the PRT's, as a piece of the reconstruction/development effort, have far more costs than benefits. A good thought experiment is to ask whether the Surge would have worked just as well with overt and direct bribery of sheikhs and officials.

A lot of PVB's stories resonated with me and my experience at the Embassy. The U.S. military was "the worst" when it came to doing everything for the Iraqis, and Peter led an ePRT (linked to an Army BCT), so I'm not surprised he has a lot of stories about well-meaning and deadline-having military personnel doing and spending with such abandon. The solar water distiller project achieved equally bad results elsewhere. Military deadlines, efforts, decisions, and requests for information were constant irritations for the other PRT's.

I understand the need to flog the book and drive up the Amazon count, but I am a little uneasy by PVB's ease in telling the stories about all of those shenanigans with the poultry plant and the media and certifying payments, but I'm pretty sure stuff like that happened all the time. The reality of cheap Brazillian shicken was there for all to grasp, but the poultry projects staggered on. No doubt, the U.S. presence distorted economics and governance.

It seemed like many State and USAID civilians were discouraged by what was going on. I remember one career USAID guy telling me that the "development clock" was going to be set back to 00:00 because almost all of the PRT, military, and USACE projects were disasters. Others just did what they were told, perhaps concluding that complaining and disagreement was not going to change anything.

AMB Crocker used to talk about "putting lipstick in a pig does not change the fact that it's a pig." In their own ways, both PVB and Mr. Donnelly make the case for PRT's applying a lot of very expensive lipstick all over the pig.

Rather than spending all of that blood and treasure to eat soup with a knife, it would have been better to order something else, or get around to building a spoon factory so soup could then be eaten with spoons.

The USG presented the worst-case scenario to justify invading Iraq. When that "mission" was "accomplished", the US then presented best-case scenarios for the liberation/occupation. Huh? I think I ripped off this point from Tom or one of his colleagues.

So people are supposed to pretend to make lemonade from bananas? Or they're failures? Or they suck if they complain about in a snarky way? Sometimes the mission is stupid, and somebody ought to speak up.

PVB and SD reference the retired COL in Iraq 101 class. The most salient thing that guy ever said was about the Iraqi insurgency, or lack thereof. Nobody in Iraq besides AQI wanted to overthrow GOI. All of that fighting, killing, ethnic cleansing, etc was among people who wanted a larger share of the government spoils, or a better strategic perch in and around Baghdad.

An alternate view to The Surge is that the US chose/switched sides in the Shia-Sunni civil war, since the Shia were succeeding too well in cleansing Sunnis from Baghdad. The Sunnis were smart to dump AQI and hitch their wagon to the Americans, since they were going to lose their areas of Baghdad. For the Americans, allying with the Sunnis was like flipping a switch on intel and opposition. For the Shia, they'll have to delay reckoning until the Americans bug out.

Please note that PRT's added little to this larger issue of heading off a civil war, partition, or preventing ethnic cleansing. If the PRT's and development/reconstruction really were important, then those activities and performance would have been overseen with more care and attention.

Does it require a person of his intellect to succeed at development projects? From what I recall, he set reasonable goals and settled for getting the plant to 50% output using $10,000 of frozen funds instead of a $15 million contractor estimate to rebuild the plant with new machinery for 100% production. This put 665 Iraqis back to work.

He empowered the plant's own personnel to buy back stolen parts from the populace and repair what could be repaired. It worked. There are many lessons there. Do something that can be accomplished in your tenure and that will produce a long-term impact. Empower the locals, not outside contractors, to manage and perform the work. Offer what technical assistance you can using organic assets - division engineers. Leave the locals in charge of a commercial venture. "Do not let the best be the enemy of the good."

So in that one instance he beat the rotation policy. I can imagine units rushing to fulfill grandiose plans within their deployment period. I can see people lying about the status of projects just as we lied about body counts in Vietnam. I learned the meaning of the term situational ethics from a West Pointer.

And yes, both in Washington and abroad, DOD can easily overwhelm State and other agencies with bodies. And, we military are mission accomplishment focused. Many times, we are not concerned about anything that gets in the way of that mission. In order for these starkly different cultures to work in harmony, the right personnel must be selected. I have not seen evidence of this.

Please. You describe the drama as a selling point about how hard you tried to reconstruct the country, provide aid to the widows, the maimed families, how you rebuild the destroyed cities. How much money have been spent on important programs to at least try to compensate the people and the society for their losses. How many young Americans have thrown away their lives for... for what exactly?

Yes, the damage you have caused. My sympathies for you efforts, but you have created the mess, you clear it up. Nobody asked you to bomb and occupy the country, least of all the Iraqis. You mean well... well, if you mean so well now, why did you mean so much ill and destruction 8 years ago?

There was no cause for war, Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, so your intervention was not necessary. Even the American leadership acknowledged that they had no genuine information on any WMD being present, so you can't even claim that you thought you might find some.

Usually at this point the next argument is that Iraq is a better place without Saddam. Now think about this: Saddam had nowhere near the kind of money, effort or will into mending his own country that you have supposedly dedicated to Iraq in the last decade. Now how can it be possible that Iraq is still in civil war? How is that possible that American soldiers are dying because the very Iraqis who should be grateful for all their effort (according to your narrative) are killing them? Another point: no matter how much work and money you pour into Iraq, you cannot make good for the fathers, husbands, sons, mothers and children you murdered.

Bottom line: what Van Buren did was pointing out that the rebuilding effort is pointless and unfruitful. Now think about this: if you dig holes at will and fill them up, who thanks you for your effort? Nobody. If you destroy countries at will and try to patch them up, who thanks you? Equally nobody. And don't be surprised if they hate your guts for the loss of life you have inflicted by your folly.

State was faced with a sisyphean task in manning the PRTs. After years of heavy staffing and budget cuts (AID, for example, was eviscerated in the 1980's, losing most of its experienced field staff) it was hard pressed to find knowledgeable experts in its ranks. the result was having to rely extensively on recruitment from the private sector and private contractors.

Now, in an effort to rebuild capability, one step has been the creation of a Civilian Response Corps (CRC) which is to identify individuals with the necessary skill sets and experience who are will to deploy in various contingencies. It is a useful first step to address this aspect of our foreign political/military requirements.

That said, as Deputy, then acting leader of an EPRT in Iraq, I believe were among the more successful teams during our time there. We were lucky to be staffed by a highly skilled set of individuals, including a senior Department of Agriculture staffer who successfully midwifed a model Iraqi agricultural association in our largely agricultural AO, which focused on the Iraqis taking the lead in identifying and implementing major agricultural improvements. Other successes included, identiyfing and then supporting an Iraqi NGO in establishing a mobile medical clinic to serve the large rural population (its success finally led the reluctant Iraqi Ministry of Health to acknowledge its existence and begin supporting it directly). Working with an Iraqi legal NGO, we supported their efforts to educate the population on their civic responsibilities, including voting, and their successful efforts to develop a new civic curriculum for use in the school system, again stressing civic responsibilities as well as national vice sectarian identities.

In all of our efforts, we tried to identify and support Iraqi organizations and individuals that were ready to take the lead, and would hopefully sustain success after our departure.

Of course we worked closely with our brigade hosts, helping them to meet their security priorities in the AO. These generally lay more in the tactical realm, such as providing a friendly tribal leader with a new road in his village, tractors, make work projects, etc.

Our EPRT's main focus, however, was on sustainable capabilities that would hopefully live on after our brigade's and our departures.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the PRT/ePRT surge in Afghanistan is structured with an O5/6 Air Force officer as team leader and a 04/5 Navy officer as his deputy. This is in contrast to Iraq when the team leader was a Foreign Service Officer and his deputy was, largely, an Army 05/4.

The great thing about a blog like Tom’s is the opportunity to hear from a wide range of knowledgeable people with many different and important perspectives.

I am reminded, however, of the many people who’s passions sometimes lead to forgetting that many of us involved in the “Civilian Surge” of 2007 and 2008, including generals, were not supporters of the war, but were seriously committed to answering the question: How does this end?

War begins, war is fought, and war ends, each being a separate stage which someone has to accomplish.

The Rumsfeld Pentagon could not end this war, nor could the State Department of that time. The strategic direction, absent the 2007 and 2008 Surge, was for the devil we already knew (war is fought).

Military historians will, no doubt, endlessly and legitimately debate the success of the military surge, but I have no doubt that, if the things done during the spring and summer of 2008 did not begin to engender the basics of Iraqi home rule, the SOFA Agreement may not have been signed, and we might still be talking about an Iraqi debacle in real-time instead of peripheral debates about how many military trainers (only) to send next year.

Those who thought the war was important, and those who did not, should look at the endgame of December 2011 with equal satisfaction. But recognize that someone had to actually go over there and end it.

Hopefully, my article and many other commenter’s points conveyed the reality: the military of 2008, once synchronized and targeted to the task, became a decisive factor, with substantial assets, for the civilian transfer of authority in Iraq essential to accomplishing the war’s end.

Whether that is a good thing or not in the scope of history is a different subject for appropriate debate, as is whether such an approach is viable in Afghanistan where the problem set is, in many ways, very different.

Without belittling later sacrifices, everything after the SOFA was signed, including Peter van Buren’s activities in 2009, was the post-agreement closing process (the end of a war).

Those of us who contributed to making the SOFA possible (the end of a war) have our own reasons for pride of accomplishment, shared respect for our colleagues that made it possible, and for those who sacrificed much more than we did.

Iraq has not unraveled. My former translator from Tikrit wrote today that things are good there in general and his 10 month old son is healthy and happy.

I, personally, would like to visit Iraq without body armor and security escorts to see again, and more carefully, the many relics and treasures from the foundations of our common civilization (Assur, Ninevah, Babylon, Ur, etc.....). Fingers crossed.

Peter van Buren and his Wemeantwell.com website just removed a series of defamatory comments about me with an email from him advising me to "Chill out" Buddy.

Code for: "Wink.Wink. I am just trying to hype my book."

Beyond that, a local Iraqi GIS poster to his site wrote in to say that the agencies I identified had nothing to do with GIS in Iraq. The real "Lions of Iraq GIS' were Mr. Duane, Mr. Moko and Mr. Sam.

Note that each was an employee of RTI, a prime "contractor" of USAID, who ran the very effective GIS local-implementation program (LPG I, II and III) which Peter's poster experienced through site visits in 2008 by those very "lions" he named (who much appreciated his comments when I passed them on).

When not on site, they were back in Baghdad with the very large combined military/civilian/US/Iraqi team making it happen. They truly were "lions" of getting GIS out to the provinces in 2008.

Wait a minute: Effective "contractors" as "lions" of civilian reconstruction doing marvelous work in Iraq?

Doesn't that run directly contrary to Peter Van Buren's supposed thesis of "We Meant Well"?

(Wink. Wink. Just hypin' his book, buddy!)

Maybe he will send some of his profits to the many civilian "contractors" killed in Iraq (see Tom's prior coverage)? (Wink, Wink. Buddy)

I am sorry but the people most often defending the "successes" in Iraq happen to be those that have made a career off of the perception of alleged successes.

War is binary. You won or you lost. Jeter had a great season. Doesn't matter since the Yankees are out of the playoffs.

Look, most everyone involved in the Iraq mess tried their best and did what they thought was right. It still does not mean the U.S. won the war. And in this case, it does not mean CORDS 2.0 aka the PRT program was a success with speed bumps.

Whenever a personal account of one individual's unique Iraq experience elicits a knee-jerk emotional defense such as this one, it only adds credibility and legitimacy to a criticism. Donnelly's wordy response to Van Buren is the only reason why I am now buying yet another book on the worst foreign policy decision in American history.

It looks like Mr. Donnelly was likely a 3161 for part of his time in Iraq. He spent another portion with the UNAMI. In contrast, Mr. Van Buren is a direct hire foreign service officer. This debate/rebuttal cycle has tribalism written all over it.