We Meant Well

Peter Van Buren is not a writer, and he admits as much from the beginning of his memoir, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. He’s a smart guy with a distinct sense of humor who was thrust, with thousands of other Americans, into an historic moment, the American effort in Iraq. He’s not out to write the definitive tome on that effort, or even to offer specific advice. Instead, he’s out to offer a generation of future scholars and policymakers “the raw material of failure,” and thereby to get a hearing for the one thing no one in Iraq wanted to admit: defeat.