Ep. 967 The Failure in Iraq: A Whistleblowing Eyewitness to the "Reconstruction" of Iraq
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 August 2017
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Peter van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department, spent a year in Iraq as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams. When you hear what the U.S. government -- which had destroyed much of the country and completely undermined its civil society -- expected him to do, you won't know whether to laugh or cry.
To make things worse, the State Department came after him when he released We Meant Well, the book we discuss in this episode.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Tom Woods Show, episode 967. |
| 0:03.5 | Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. |
| 0:08.1 | Your daily dose of Liberty Education starts here, the Tom Woods Show. |
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| 0:29.5 | harries.com slash Woods. |
| 0:32.4 | Hi everybody. Tom Woods here. What a great episode today. We've got Peter Van Buren with us. |
| 0:39.3 | He is the author of several books, but the one we're going to be talking about today is, we meant well, how I helped lose |
| 0:44.5 | the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Very, very interesting and extremely |
| 0:50.6 | well-written book. Peter Van Buren is a former U.S. Foreign Service employee who spent a year in Iraq serving as team leader for two provincial reconstruction teams. He's a 24-year veteran of the U.S. Department of State. He writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, WeMentwell.com. And when he wrote this book and it was released, |
| 1:15.0 | the State Department began legal proceedings against him. A very, very interesting story overall. |
| 1:20.1 | You're going to love reading this book, which of course I will link to at tomwoods.com slash |
| 1:25.7 | 967. Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me |
| 1:30.9 | here today. What an interesting perspective you bring, and thank goodness you know how to write. |
| 1:36.4 | Oh my gosh. And it's so, you also know the techniques. You could have started the book by saying, |
| 1:42.8 | in 2009, I was sent to... |
| 1:45.0 | No. You start with this extremely revealing story about a bunch of books called My Arabic Library. And what I took from that is what I think you were intending to convey that here we have in microcosm the whole American approach to Iraq. |
| 2:03.2 | So can you start, even though it's a trivial story, I think it's not. Can you tell us that story? |
| 2:07.6 | Absolutely. When I was sent to Iraq, my mission working for the Department of State as I was, |
| 2:14.3 | was nothing less than to win the war. The military had tried to win the war by blowing |
| 2:19.7 | stuff up and having surges and all those kinds of things, and it just hadn't worked. So the idea was |
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