The greedy battle for Iraq’s ‘Hearts And Minds’

[ganulv]

Ganulv:

This guy's continuous insulting slurs of Iraqis, and Iraq in general, far outweigh his fuming disdain for the (1) loser military nuts, (2) the dopes, creeps and incompetents that he was forced to "lead," and the (3) the stupid crooks he worked for.

I didn’t really get fuming disdain from the interview. His tone came across as a bit effete to me, if anything. And I didn’t hear any insulting slurs of Iraqis. He clearly had issues with at least one colonel in particular, but I don’t know that he thought he was a loser nut as much as he was puzzled as to why anyone should think the guy was qualified to do development work in the first place.

Where do they find these people?

Stanford, Georgetown, Davidson, etc.… All institutions which to be sure count very effective FSOs and colonels as their own, but whose training does not by itself mean one is up to snuff for the task at hand.

[Steve the Planner]

I read the excepts from Amazon.

Apparently, almost everyone (but him) was some kind of a creature from the Star Wars bar. Very uncomfortable if you happened to be any of these people (or the various thieving Arabs he described).


Bio shows he is an Asian specialist, fluent in Mandarin, with multiple assignments there.

I know for a fact that FOB Falcon's EPRT had one of the best dry land/range ag specialists assigned to it in late 2008, who had previously spent nine months in Tuz.

My experience with EPRTs, including at FOB Hammer, was that they were some of the best and most committed of the DoS folks. The good ones were like human sponges when in Baghdad or at the MND---always looking for ideas, resources and assets to take back.

You either loved that kind of work or didn't---getting out to the towns and on the streets.

He obviously hated it, and was not effective at finding the resources needed to bring back a set of positive accomplishments.