Inside the World's Largest Embassy

Welcome to the Vatican-sized US Embassy in Baghdad, home to a $2 million dead lawn and the world's worst bar scene.

By Peter Van Buren | Wed Sep. 28, 2011 http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/baghdad-peter-van-buren-we-meant-well

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Editor's note: In 2009, Peter Van Buren, a two-decade veteran of the Foreign Service, volunteered to go to Iraq. Drawn by "the nexus of honor, duty, terrorism, and my oldest daughter's college tuition," he signed on as the head of an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, part of a "civilian surge" to rebuild the country and pave the way for the withdrawal of American combat troops. He'd joined the biggest nation-building exercise in history, a still-unfinished $63-billion effort that Van Buren compares to "past[ing] together feathers year after year, hoping for a duck." Van Buren's acerbic new memoir, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People [1], recounts his two years as an official feather-paster in a country that's become an afterthought to most Americans.

Even before he hit the ground, Van Buren found that the State Department's efforts to stabilize Iraq were as haphazard and unrealistic as the initial military effort to invade the country. In his acknowledgments, Van Buren singles out former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, "who led an organization I once cared deeply for into a swamp and abandoned us there." Not surprisingly, Van Buren, who still works for the State Department, has ruffled some feathers at Foggy Bottom. "The State Department…is like a Mafia family: one doesn't talk about family matters outside the family," he told Publisher's Weekly [2]. "When a colleague learns about my book, the first question is always 'Are you in trouble?' I am afraid the answer is yes." Van Buren says the department has been investigating him and that his boss delivered a threatening message from an unnamed superior, "just like in a gangster movie." 
Though Van Buren spent much of his time in Iraq in the field, in the excerpt below, he recalls life inside Baghdad's Green Zone, home to an immense, surreal US Embassy and "the world's worst bar scene."