Peter Van Buren

(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...

The New York Times reports that the State Department, in the face of massive costs and Iraqi officials who say they never wanted it in the first place, slashed and may soon dump entirely "a multibillion-dollar police training program in Iraq that was to have been the centerpiece" of...

Final tuition bills, spring in the air -- it is commencement season, and soon-to-be graduates across the United States are poised to transition into unemployment. Many will seek jobs in America's lone growth sector, government, and specifically with the Department of State as Foreign Service Officers. Should you join?

Before...

The Washington Post informs with a story out of Afghanistan about how the Department of State, after signing a ten-year lease and spending more than $80 million on a site envisioned as the United States' diplomatic hub in northern Afghanistan, have abandoned their plans. Why does the State Department...

Thank you for sending me copies of your books (they arrived in today's mail), and thank you even more for writing "with admiration for your truth telling" inside the cover flap of one. I am humbled, because I waited my whole life to realize today I had already met you.

Left Behind
What We Lost in Iraq and Washington, 2009-2012

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

People ask the question in various ways, sometimes hesitantly, often via a long digression, but my answer is always the same: no regrets.

In some 24 years of...

Just like with my own wedding anniversary, I'm a few days late recognizing the ninth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, but sincere in marking the occasion none the less.

As with wedding anniversaries (I am really sorry honey, I thought you liked Denny's and yes, in retrospect,...

Historians of the future, if they are not imprisoned for saying so, will trace the end of America's democratic experiment to the fearful days immediately after 9/11, what Bruce Springsteen called the days of the empty sky, when frightened, small men named Bush and Cheney made the first decisions to...

The Campaign Against Whistleblowers in Washington

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution...

The task of bringing home the realities of what our soldiers brought home falls to filmmakers

Too soon?

It took years of bad movies (The Green Berets) and vague-enough-for-prime-time allusional references (M*A*S*H) before the semi-metaphorical Deer Hunter gave way to trippy Apocalypse Now (and even then it had...

Responsibility starts with the trigger-puller, but ends in the White House.

With only a handful Christmas shopping days left, we can tell that the U.S. military involvement in Iraq is coming to an end. Talk in the media, in the White House and in the barracks has turned...

The last man to die for a mistake, this time around, is Army Spec. David Emanuel Hickman. He was hit by an IED on November 14 and later died of his injuries. We mourn his loss.

While our president plays politics, making a speech this week using (again)...

New records released after a four year FOIA fight between the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the web site Gawker show that mercenaries, primarily from Blackwater, shot and sometimes killed a lot of Iraqis in the name of protecting America's diplomats. The mercs, er, the private security...

Stephen Glain's new book, State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empire, is a brilliant, sober, sad and important biography of the Department of State since World War II. The choice of word here--biography--is significant, in that instead...

George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury Would Have Recognized Morris Davis's Problem

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Here’s the First Amendment, in full: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of...

State Department personnel in Iraq may be in danger as transition plans leave gaps in security and medical care

The State Department can often times be so inward looking that it fixes the facts based on the policy need, making reality fit the vision whether that naughty reality wants to...

Military suicides are claiming more lives than the enemy.

Pick the statistic that makes it mean the most to you: between 2005 to 2010, active duty service members took their own lives at a rate of approximately one every 36 hours. The Veteran's Administration estimates that...

Andy Rooney, who we'll all admit became kind of a pain in the neck at the end, died this past weekend. He did write something interesting:

Having gotten into the war, all America wanted to consider itself a winner was to get out. Unable to make things the way...

It Was the 2007 Nisour Square Blackwater Killings, Not Wikileaks, that Derailed Plans for U.S. Troops to Stay on in Iraq

Despite some creative speech making as Obama tries to take credit for "agreeing" to withdraw the last of America's occupying army from Iraq by the end of the year,...

Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge is a popular history of the U.S.' efforts at nation building, the hearts and minds territory that my own book We Meant Well plumbs. There are a lot of euphemisms for these...