Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, was published in 2011, and his second book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, was published in 2014. His newest book, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, has just been published.
The cumulative effects of years of deindustrialization, weakened unions and soaring inequality have fundamentally reordered the country.
Taxpayers are basically moneylenders to a government that is far more interested in subsidizing business than in caring for their workers.
Rahinah Ibrahim’s life was derailed by the tangle of national security bureaucracies that have come to define post-9/11 America.
Robert MacLean, a US Air Marshal fired for allegedly leaking sensitive government documents, is just trying to get his job back. For the rest of us, his case has much more profound implications.
It’s still possible to remember, almost nostalgically, how the Fifth Amendment used to guarantee Americans due process.
The United States’ top diplomat is a figure of his times (and that’s not a good thing.)
Why saying no to Syria matters (and it's not about Syria).
What if your country begins to change and no one notices?