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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA On
the run from America's Stasi By
Peter Van Buren
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
government service, I experienced my share of
dissonance when it came to what was said in public
and what the government did behind the public's
back. In most cases, the gap was filled with
scared little men and women, and what was left
unsaid just hid the mistakes and flaws of those
anonymous functionaries.
What
I saw while serving the State Department at a
forward operating base in Iraq was, however,
different. There, the space between what we were
doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement),
and what we were saying (the endless claims
of
success and progress), was filled with numb
soldiers and devastated Iraqis, not scaredy-cat
bureaucrats.
That was too much for even a
well-seasoned cubicle warrior like me to ignore
and so I wrote a book about it, We Meant Well: How I Helped
Lose the War for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi
People. I was on the spot to see it all
happen, leading two Provincial Reconstruction
Teams (PRTs) in rural Iraq while taking part up
close and personal in what the US government was
doing to, not for, Iraqis.
Originally, I imagined that
my book's subtitle would be "Lessons for
Afghanistan", since I was hoping the same mistakes
would not be endlessly repeated there. Sometimes
being right doesn't solve a damn thing.
By
the time I arrived in Iraq in 2009, I hardly
expected to be welcomed as a liberator or greeted
- as the officials who launched the invasion of
that country expected back in 2003 - with a parade
and flowers. But I never imagined Iraq for quite
the American disaster it was either. Nor did I
expect to be welcomed back by my employer, the
State Department, as a hero in return for my book
of loony stories and poignant moments that summed
up how the United States wasted more than $44
billion in the reconstruction/deconstruction of
Iraq. But I never imagined that the State
Department would retaliate against me.
In
return for my book, a truthful account of my year
in Iraq, my security clearance was taken away, I
was sent home to sit on my hands for months, then
temporarily allowed to return only as a
disenfranchised teleworker and, as I write this,
am drifting through the final steps toward
termination.
What
we left behind in Iraq Sadly enough, in the almost
two years since I left Iraq, little has happened
that challenges my belief that we failed in the
reconstruction and, through that failure, lost the
war.
The Iraq of today is an
extension of the Iraq I saw and described. The
recent Arab League summit in Baghdad, hailed by
some as a watershed event, was little more than a
stage-managed wrinkle in that timeline, a lot like
all those purple-fingered elections the US
sponsored in Iraq throughout the occupation.
If
you deploy enough police and soldiers - for the
summit, Baghdad was shut down for a week, the cell
phone network turned off, and a "public holiday"
proclaimed to keep the streets free of humanity -
you can temporarily tame any place, at least
within camera view. More than US$500 million was
spent, in part planting flowers along the route
dignitaries took in and out of the heavily
fortified International Zone at the heart of the
capital (known in my day as the Green Zone).
Somebody in Iraq must have googled "Potemkin
Village".
Beyond the temporary
showmanship, the Iraq we created via our war is a
mean place, unsafe and unstable. Life goes on
there (with the usual lack of electricity and
potable water), but as the news shows, to an angry
symphony of suicide bombers and targeted killings.
While the American public may have changed the
channel to more exciting shows in Libya, now
Syria, or maybe just to American Idol, the Iraqi
people are trapped in amber, replaying the scenes
I saw in 2009-2010, living reminders of all the
good we failed to do.
Ties between Iraq and Iran
continue to strengthen, however, with Baghdad
serving as a money-laundering stopover for a
Tehran facing tightening US and European
sanctions, even as it sells electricity to Iraq.
(That failed reconstruction program again!)
Indeed, with Iran now able to meddle in Iraq in
ways it couldn't have when Saddam Hussein was in
power, that country will be more capable of
contesting US hegemony in the region.
Given what we left behind in
Iraq, it remains beyond anyone, even the nasty men
who started the war in 2003, to claim victory or
accomplishment or achievement there, and except
for the odd pundit seeking to rile his audience,
none do.
What
we left behind at home The other story that played
out over the months since I returned from Iraq is
my own. Though the State Department officially
cleared We Meant Well
for publication in October 2010, it began an
investigation of me a month before the book hit
store shelves. That investigation was completed
way back in December 2011, though the State
Department took no action at that time to
terminate me.
I filed a complaint as a
whistleblower with the Office of the Special
Counsel (OSC) in January 2012. It was only after
that complaint - alleging retaliation - was filed,
and just days before the OSC was to deliver its
document discovery request to State, that my
long-time employer finally moved to fire me.
Timing is everything in love, war, and
bureaucracy.
The charges it leveled are
ridiculous (including "lack of candor", as if
perhaps too much candor was not the root problem
here). State was evidently using my case to show
off its authority over its employees by creating a
parody of justice, and then enforcing it to
demonstrate that, well, when it comes to stomping
on dissent, anything goes.
My
case also illustrates the crude use of "national
security" as a tool within government to silence
dissent. TheState Department's Diplomatic Security
office, its internal Stasi, monitored my home
e-mail and web usage for months, used computer
forensics to spelunk for something naughty in my
online world, placed me on a Secret Service Threat
Watch list, examined my finances, and used hacker
tools to vacuum up my droppings around the web -
all, by the way, at an unknown cost to the
taxpayers.
Diplomatic Security even sent
an agent around to interview my neighbors, fishing
for something to use against me in a full-spectrum
deep dive into my life, using the new tools and
power available to government not to stop
terrorists, but to stop me.
As
our government accumulates ever more of what it
thinks the American people have no right to know
about, there will only be increasing persecutions
as prosecutions. Many of the illegal things
president Richard Nixon did to the famous Pentagon
Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are now both
legal (under the Patriot Act) and far easier to
accomplish with new technologies.
There is
no need, for instance, to break into my
psychiatrist's office looking for dirt, as
happened to Ellsberg; after all, the National
Security Agency can break into my doctor's
electronic records as easily as you can read this
page.
With its aggressive and sadly
careless use of the draconian Espionage Act to
imprison whistleblowers, the Barack Obama
administration has, in many cases, moved beyond
harassment and intimidation into actually wielding
the beautiful tools of justice in a perverse way
to silence dissent.
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