iPhone app iPad app Android phone app Android tablet app

Peter Van Buren
GET UPDATES FROM Peter Van Buren
 
Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, a sarcastic, funny, sad, angry book about his work for the Department of State as the leader of two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) in rural Iraq, 2009-2010. His blog at www.wemeantwell.com continues the story, with daily humor and commentary about Iraq, the Middle East and national security.

Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, spent a year in Iraq leading two State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Following his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), published in 2011, the Department of State began termination proceedings against him, reassigning him to a make-work position and stripping him of his security clearance and diplomatic credentials. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren will instead retire from the State Department with his full benefits of service in September.

Peter’s commentary has been featured on TomDispatch, The New York Times, Salon, NPR, al Jazzeera, Huffington Post, The Nation, American Conservative Magazine, Mother Jones, Michael Moore.com, Le Monde, The Guardian (UK), Daily Kos, Middle East Online, Guernica and others.

He is currently working on a second book, about the social and economic changes in America between WWII and the decline of the blue collar middle class in the 1980’s. Van Buren describes the work as a blend of Grapes of Wrath, the old Wonder Years TV show and good Bruce Springsteen songs.

Blog Entries by Peter Van Buren

Hanging Out at the Playboy Mansion While Colonel Davis Waits for Justice

(0) Comments | Posted May 15, 2013 | 2:37 PM

Not to brag (OK, I'm bragging) but I am invited to the Playboy Mansion on May 22 to attend the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Awards. It is as good a place as any to hang out while one of this year's award winners, Colonel Morris Davis, waits (and waits...)...

Read Post

Homeland Insecurity

(57) Comments | Posted May 9, 2013 | 10:03 AM

Seven Years, Untold Dollars to Silence One Man

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

What do words mean in a post-9/11 world? Apart from the now clichéd Orwellian twists that turn brutal torture into mere enhanced interrogation, the devil is in the details. Robert MacLean is a former air...

Read Post

We Were Once the American Dream

(13) Comments | Posted April 3, 2013 | 8:25 PM

We were once the American Dream, and now we're just what happened to it. That's the phrase that informs my research into a new book I'm working on, The People on the Bus: A Story of the #99Percent. I'm trying to trace the decline of the American Middle Class...

Read Post

Review: Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

(3) Comments | Posted March 18, 2013 | 4:06 PM

There are ghosts in Washington that few will talk about, roaming the halls of the Pentagon, inside the State Department and the CIA, and at the White House, moaning "Vietnam, Vietnam." Nick Turse, in his new book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, awakens...

Read Post

Mission Unaccomplished

(110) Comments | Posted March 7, 2013 | 9:36 AM

Why the Invasion of Iraq Was the Single Worst Foreign Policy Decision in American History

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American...

Read Post

You Are Not a Person, Anwar al-Awlaki

(1) Comments | Posted March 5, 2013 | 12:47 PM

Though I spent 24 years working for the State Department as a Consular Officer, charged in part with the issuance and (very rarely) revocation of U.S. passports, there is still room to learn something new: The Government of the United States can, and apparently does, take away passports from American...

Read Post

I Am Patient Zero in Our New Economy: Raise the Minimum Wage

(59) Comments | Posted February 14, 2013 | 10:27 AM

In his State of the Union Address, the president said that the federal minimum wage should be raised to nine dollars an hour. He said also that a person holding down a full-time job should not have to live in poverty in a country like America. I could not...

Read Post

Music to Our Ears: Failing in Afghanistan as We Did in Iraq

(0) Comments | Posted February 3, 2013 | 8:27 AM

Kids and music go together beautifully. Free from pretensions, children play from their hearts. Put that beauty into an international setting -- in this case, young people from war-torn Afghanistan coming to the U.S. to perform traditional songs at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall -- and it becomes something...

Read Post

An All-American Nightmare

(40) Comments | Posted December 18, 2012 | 9:44 AM

Why Zero Dark Thirty Won’t Settle the Torture Question or Purge Torture From the American System

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

If you look backward you see a nightmare. If you look forward you become the nightmare.

There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in...

Read Post

Spirit in the Night

(1) Comments | Posted November 21, 2012 | 8:56 AM

"Who the hell are you?"

"Why Barack, I'm the Ghost of Presidential Legacies Past."

"What are you doing here? It's not even Thanksgiving. I thought you guys visited on Christmas Eve, anyway. It starts earlier every year, doesn't it?"

"You're confusing me with other spirits, Barack. I...

Read Post

I Did Not Vote for a Candidate for President. I'm Sorry.

(83) Comments | Posted November 5, 2012 | 12:13 PM

I'm really sorry, but I did not vote for a candidate for president. Whatever bad comes of this election, I guess you can blame it on me. But I don't think I'm alone.

I couldn't vote for Romney. He is a guy who made money destroying America. He started a...

Read Post

Six Critical Foreign Policy Questions That Won't Be Raised in the Presidential Debates

(38) Comments | Posted October 11, 2012 | 10:35 AM

Don’t Ask and Don’t Tell

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

We had a debate club back in high school. Two teams would meet in the auditorium, and Mr. Garrity would tell us the topic, something 1970s-ish like “Resolved: Women Should Get Equal...

Read Post

It Wasn't Just a Movie -- U.S. Ambassador to Libya Killed

(27) Comments | Posted September 12, 2012 | 1:55 PM

It wasn't just a movie.

It was less than a year ago that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was videotaped gleefully laughing at the brutal death of then-Libyan leader Gaddafi. "We came, we saw, he died!" giggled the Secretary of State like a drunk school girl on the sidelines...

Read Post

The Persecution of John Kiriakou

(47) Comments | Posted September 11, 2012 | 11:15 AM

Torture and the Myth of Never Again

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Here is what military briefers like to call BLUF, the Bottom Line Up Front: no one except John Kiriakou is being held accountable for America’s torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn’t torture anyone, he just...

Read Post

America's Increasingly Irrelevant Concierge Abroad

(5) Comments | Posted August 22, 2012 | 12:45 PM

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report shows that more than one fourth of all U.S. State Department Foreign Service positions are either unfilled or are filled with below-grade employees. What should be staggering news pointing out a crisis in government is in fact barely worth a media mention,...

Read Post

How Not to Reconstruct Iraq, Afghanistan -- or America

(116) Comments | Posted August 16, 2012 | 10:55 AM

A Guide to Disaster at Home and Abroad

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.Com

Some images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion...

Read Post

Waiting (Happy Birthday, U.S. Army)

(0) Comments | Posted June 15, 2012 | 12:58 PM

There was a lot of thanking of veterans this past Memorial Day weekend, and that is not altogether out of place. June 14 was the U.S. Army's 237th birthday, and another round of thanks is in order. We ask a lot from the people in the military, and...

Read Post

Leaking War

(1) Comments | Posted June 12, 2012 | 10:42 AM

How Obama’s Targeted Killings, Leaks, and the Everything-Is-Classified State Have Fused

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.

White is black and down is up. Leaks that favor the president are shoveled out regardless of national security, while national security is twisted to pummel leaks that do not...

Read Post

On Social Media, State Department Stands Alone

(0) Comments | Posted June 1, 2012 | 2:36 PM

As other parts of the federal government begin to examine their own practices toward social media and publication review, the State Department stands alone in clinging to a 19th century model emphasizing lack of transparency and message control. That State seeks this modus in a largely unclassified world and while...

Read Post

ACLU: State Department Violates Constitutional Rights

(0) Comments | Posted May 17, 2012 | 2:40 PM

(For those joining our story already in progress, here's the Twitter-length summary: I've worked for the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer for some 24 years. I spent a year in Iraq, wrote a book critical of the State Department's waste and mismanagement in Iraq, blogged about it and...

Read Post