I've read a lot of sad books lately: on hunger, on cancer, on the casual brutality of high school. Van Buren, however, skewers the absurdities and self-contradictions of the situations he finds himself in, and this leavens the sadness of the wasted opportunity to actually rebuild Iraq. Without his black sense of humour, this would be a grim polemic or autobiographical diatribe. Instead, it's a light read but one that will have you groaning and appalled.

Van Buren can see everyone's motivations. The politicians in the US push priorities to the army and to the State Department, who reward their people in the field for their ability to deliver projects with those priorities. To get rewarded, you have to deliver before you're sent back home at the end of your one year tour, so everyone's incentivized to do short-term "quick wins". Nobody ever wants to look at whether the projects *achieved* anything, merely to be able to have a photo op and to accumulate these paper successes. The volumes of money wasted in this way will blow your mind.

The $2M+ chicken factory was classic. Because there's no good transportation or chilled storage, because the roads are crap and the power's on for only 2 hours each day, everyone keeps live chickens and kills them to eat. Any market for frozen chickens was taken by imported food. Scale for chicken raising and slaughter had to be huge to be economical. This new chicken processing plant couldn't run cheap enough and, indeed, was never run but for photo ops. And this was all predicted in an earlier US AID report on the viability of chicken processing plants (they weren't viable) and ignored by folks who needed a project they could champion and point to the building and say "success!" on.

I'm tempted to draw conclusions about government's ability to run anything. The short-term political push and pull can't be allowed to interfere with the long-term success of any government program, whether it's managing the nation's energy supply or rebuilding a nation we destroyed in the name of democracy. I'm now keen to read up on how (whether?) it's possible to so insulate good works that they can't be ruined, only improved, by the state that runs them.

I don't imagine that book will be quite so painfully funny, however.