Congress approved these jobs programs for Iraqui throughout 2000s, but now Congress won't approve jobs programs for honest but destitute Americans???

i think that the Factory deco have to work again to make people serious again.

I'm hoping someone, anyone, was aware that as tasty as French pastries are, the croissant is perhaps the most buttery affront to Islam ever conceived.

Yea, These parasites are ruining our country. Thanks !Please read this article on the massive military base buildup in Iraq that we are now forced to leave behind.
Ar Condicionado Imoveis Acompanhante Massagistas

Peter Van Buren wrote this piece too carelessly that to make much of a point. If he has any point, it seems to be that all these State programs should have been designed to cheer up Peter Van Buren. As to the specifics I can find (the promised third section of this story I can't get to open):

The donkey play: Van Buren said it bored one small audience, suggesting it's the only audience that ever saw it. is that true? was that the Bsioton equivalent of a tryout in Boston?

Paving: Van Buren doesn't seem to know whether the USgovt contracted for grading, gravel, asphalt or concrete but implies that it got less than it paid for. His guess. That the Iraqi army didn't like it does not make it a bad idea.

Gym art: Van Buren might or might not know much about art, but knows what he doesn't like. The painting wasn't designed for him, it was designed for Iraqis. Ignoring that, he suggests everybody thought about it the way he does. No reason to agree with him.

Kids' bikes: Did the kids ride around on them? I no know, Van Buren no say. They certainly used a couple to make a wheelchair, which seems a plus in war-ravaged Iraq. I've seen kids' hand-made carts using bike wheels in America with no thought that this showed bicycles were a bad idea.

Children's art: Van Buren left his in Iraq, aw gee. As noted above, he might or might not know much about art, but he knows what he doesn't like, and attacks the government because he didn't like that calendar.

Vets for the zoo: Van Buren points out, grudgingly, that this internet connection is being used by Iraqi veterinarians for exactly what was intended, and regards that as ridiculous. So where's the failure?

Yellow pages: This seems a good idea and extremely modestly budgeted. Van Buren's careless refusal to tell us what it was physically (about as thick as a copy of TIME magazine? Much thinner? Size of pages? Their number? Were they, in fact, yellow?) offers us no reason to believe it was a bad one. He ingloriously suggests that the delivery people might have thrown lots of them away and lacks any understanding that an initial 250-merchant publication could lead in fairly short time to something much more widely helpful to phone users. To the Van Buren mind displayed here and elsewhere, the idea of oaks growing from acorns is entirely foreign.

Humor is absent from this witty nihilistic report, but its Yellow Pages section reminds me of the old joke about America's gentlest, kindest police force, supposedly in a small village with a phone directory covering a single sheet of business-size paper. Beating suspects around the head with this never extracted a confession, and never sent anybody to hospital, either.

When I was in Iraq, I also had a lot of latitude with money. I also lacked training for this type of responsibility. I was an Infantry Officer who was more at home conducting patrols. But I didn't propose any dumb projects like this.

Then again, I also haven't figured out how to get a job via the USAJOBS.gov website, but these State Dept apparently workers did.

As a State Dept. employee, it is logical that Peter Van Buren was not qualified to do/knew little about the aid work he was given in Iraq. State Department Foreign Service Officers primarily do reporting. They know very little about development design, strategy or implementation.

Since the Bush years, State has been bending over backwards to grab the aid function (and, oh by the way, money) for itself. While it may have the political power to muscle itself into the job, that does not mean it knows how or has the skills and experience to do it. Indeed, for mainstream State FSO's, there is very little or no career reward for such and "out of cone" assignments. Therefore, rarely does State put its best and brightest into jobs such as Van Buren held.

Of course State development efforts in Iraq didn't succeed.

Yes, No, Maybe.

Bluebers is correct that FSOs have no training or qualifications in much other than reporting: That is their professional task.

Having said that, there were some very smart and capable FSOs in Iraq, either doing what they were professionally qualified for (reporting) or, doing good things where possible.

The old style FSOs, the kind that lived with family in many overseas assignment and brought many life skills with them, did some remarkable things, as did the very newest ones, often joining after substantial experience in and around war zones (Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc...).

The former came early on (to answer Crocker's call) and the later came in later 2008 (but never in big numbers).

Unfortunately, Van Buren represents that worst standard deviation across the board.

Anyone knowledgeable about any of the subjects he writes about so comically understands, as Kunino references, that there is much more to the story.

Children's art, for example, is a routinely therapeutic practice for war survivors, and, if done well, helps to engage the community in understanding itself, including, through the naivety of children, illuminating many of the shared experiences of an entire family, village or town. If done by a bewildered and ill-prepared local NGO group with no understanding of the task or purpose, and with no follow up, it becomes simply a make work project for otherwise destitute women (mostly widows, often displaced, and with many mouths to feed). Laughing at this scheme, or its actual content, purpose and benefit is the same as looking out from your air-conditioned MRAP and laughing at the survivors.

As for chickens, MND-North (Northern Iraq under MG Hertling) began a systematic analysis of the poultry chain in early 2008, which, in part, identified all the destroyed agribusiness assets (grain mills, hatcheries, slaughterhouses, fattening barns) and began systematically targeting the core problems---lack of market access (road systems), and knowledge/access to nearby resources (due to lack of security). Example: Underused hatcheries due to war disruption.

Everyone knew of the Tikrit Poultry processing facility, which newbies in 2008 were always trying to rehab as their "low-hanging-fruit" accomplishment, but civilian and military leaders (including FSOs) knew there was no point in re-opening it until the bigger problems were solved (market access, underlying supplies of chickens, etc...).

There was a great deal of information sharing going on in 2008 between MNF- I and the various MNDs (including MND- Central).

How this joker came along in 2009 and got this ridiculous poultry processing sham going (as described in his book) is, perhaps, best described by a bureaucracy burning up the last of the funds after the serious resources and oversight had moved on.

There is no dispute that from the Bremer days on, many mistakes were made. But for a serving FSO to be purchasing chickens to run them through a non-functioning poultry house on days when VIPs and reporters came, solely to delude them into believing something was operating when it was not, is not consistent with the reporting skills for which a serving FSO is actually charged. Fraud is fraud. Waste is waste. Very poor personnel assignments sometimes happen.

Myself, I was one of those emergency civilian senior advisors brought in in 2007 and 2008 to make sure these practices were curtailed, and, while finding plenty of bad examples (as told I would before I would) found abundant support from military and DoS leadership levels to change things.

My handful of senior civilian cohorts found no shortage of people working hard under very trying circumstances---especially in Embedded PRTs (small groups assigned to military units at the town levels), who, unlike Van Buren, were always in search of good ideas to take back to local Iraqis they had contact with.

Van Buren, if his tales are true, seems to have defied all the odds, making every mistake he could possibly make, without any apparent guidance or competence. It is just too incredible.

Maybe if he had accurately reported this stuff in real time up the chain, with an accurate description of what was going on, someone could have stopped it, instead of leaving him to stumble so chaotically and unproductively around Iraq for a year.

I doubt there was ever such a report.

So if things were so bad and so mis-managed and so counter to Van Buren's ideals, I have to ask: How come he didn't resign? If he wasn't going to resign, then why did he keep his Iraq bonuses? I mean, he, according to his ego, knew everything was going badly and he couldn't stop thing, so why did he continue to be part of it? He received on top of his base pay a hell of a lot of money and benefits for one year of work including danger pay; work differential; involuntary seperate maintenance allowance; 66 days of leave; free meals and so forth. Did he keep it all? Did he return some of it? Did he donate any to charity? Surely he must stay up all night agonizing over the fact he got paid upwards of 225,000 and yet thought the whole year was a waste of time. He must have ulcers trying to decide what to do with that money. But wait, how much did he get paid for this book? So not only did he get his State pay, but now he's getting paid to write about what a waste of time Iraq was while he was getting paid to be in Iraq - essentially profiting from a tax payer funded trip to screw everything up. What a POS.

Huddled in an armored vehicle, probably under armed escort and wearing body armor, Mr Van Buren never saw a patisserie in Baghdad and thus feels empowered to say that a very modest budget -- less than $10,000 expended on educating Iraqi women -- produced total failure. The charm for this claim escapes me, since he offers no evidence to support it, and sees no need to.

Putting his bah and his humbug to one side, we seem to discern this retired foreign service officer's 18th century slogan modified for the age of global terror: Let Iraqis not eat cake.

yes of course, anti-Semitism started spreading in the Middle East after the Arabs got a whiff of the plans that were being made against them. But please, if you are going to mention the massacre of Hebron, there were plenty more carried out by the Jewish Irgun & the Haganah. Bombing markets, bombing the Kind David Hotel and the list is bloody long if you want to research it. You make it sound, like the Arabs just woke up one day and decided to go postal for no reason! There were also plenty of Palestinian Jews against the creation of the State of Israel. Those were conveniently silenced of course! Any Arab nationalism that united Palestinians regardless of their religion was muffled.
Hakan Selvi from Varolmak.

It is crazy what happens in the world these days. Some for the good.. some for the bad.. and some that are spun to be whatever the people in charge want them to be. These entrepreneurs should be selling prom dress instead of doing some of the negative deeds they are required to perform.

Hm,

as I see it quite funny (being myself in PRT), I have to admit that - altough we are used that americans do stupid things in large scale and miss education almost in all aspects of development work - this is much more stupid than I expected someone to do and get approved funds for... and what more - consider it funny...

Cheers,
Scaramax

This is probably just a fraction of the amount that is wasted by our government. It is ridiculous how much fat their is in our budget and it is time that we stop wasting money. The government is run so poorly and inefficiently that it is no wonder that are country is going bankrupt state by state and sent to a debt collection agency, which just happens to be China...so as much as this hurts to read, it is a little too late to recover from this tail spin...we need to go through some changes and it is not going to be easy at all, but it is something the country must do to save itself from complete financial collapse.

Cooking classes he complains about in their book weren't supposed to make FSOs instant experts. They expected website visitors to have known their jobs, to possess done theirtruth about absresearch, to possess been mature enough you just read concerning the country these were planning to. If he went in unprepared rather than creating a clue, than that has been his fault. For example, should you read his website he sounds somewhat experienced expert at employed in rough conditions.

While it may have the political power to muscle itself into the job, that does not mean it knows how or has the skills and experience to do it. Indeed, for mainstream State FSO's, there is very little or no career reward for such and "out of cone" assignments. seslichat Therefore, rarely does State put its best and brightest into jobs such as Van Buren held.

The purpose of helping Iraq is there, and we all know that it aims the good intention of luring these people to do something more productive, or perhaps give their own share of making the place a normal one, where people can live freely, walk on streets without facing danger and beingzapped every now and then. But then, it is not a hidden fact that all these are still part of most Iraqi’s dreams. All these can happen in the future though, but Iraq needs to rebuild its city first which is not hard to achieve, if everyone will give his or her own cooperation.