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Peter Van Buren

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book,  We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. ATomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog, We Meant Well. His new book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, has just been published.

FILE - This frame grab from a March 6, 2017 video provided by the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), shows fighters from the SDF opening fire on a position of the Islamic State group in the countryside east of Raqqa, Syria. As the American –backed SDF fighters bear down on Raqqa, the militants have trapped the city’s estimated 300,000 residents to use as human shields, ringing the city with land mines to prevent escape. (Syria Democratic Forces, via AP, File) (AP)

Whistleblowers, moral injury, and endless war

Peter Van Buren
(Reuters/Allison Joyce)

I helped create a climate of fear in the new age of terrorism, and I’m sorry

Peter Van Buren

5 lessons America has failed to learn from the Iraq War

Peter Van Buren
Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump (Reuters/Stephen Lam/Jonathan Drake/Photo montage by Salon)

5 foreign policy questions we’ll never ask our presidential candidates

Peter Van Buren
In this photo taken Monday, July 27, 2015, Chikwanha Nyashanu prepares fish at an Ivar's restaurant in Seattle. After Seattle's new minimum wage law took effect last April 1, Ivar’s Seafood Restaurants announced that it was jacking up its prices by about 21 percent, eliminating tipping as a routine procedure, and immediately paying all its hourly workers a $15 per hour. They began the new pay rate three years earlier than the law required. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) (AP)

Minimum wage, minimum chance of a future: This is how horrible living on the minimum wage has become

Peter Van Buren
(AP/Reuters/John Locher/John Minchillo/Photo Montage by Salon)

The only strategy that can defeat ISIS is one no Republican would ever embrace

Peter Van Buren
(AP/Reuters/John Locher/John Minchillo/Photo Montage by Salon)

We’re not beating ISIS like this: America has no easy solution to its Middle Eastern crisis — and maybe none at all

Peter Van Buren
(Reuters/Jim Young)

We’re still fighting George W. Bush’s battles: Syria, ISIS and the “worst foreign policy blunder” in American History

Peter Van Buren
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, left, talks to Hassan Khomeini, grandson of late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini. ( (AP/Vahid Salemi)

The Middle East will never be the same: Why the Iran pact is a historic triumph

Peter Van Buren
(AP/Jaber al-Helo)

5 Iraq strategies that are guaranteed to fail

Peter Van Buren
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, left, talks to Hassan Khomeini, grandson of late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini. ( (AP/Vahid Salemi)

America’s other Iraq calamity: How our failed war has empowered Iran

Peter Van Buren
Bradley Cooper in "American Sniper" (Warner Bros. Entertainment)

America loves its war porn: “American Sniper” and the Hollywood propaganda machine

Peter Van Buren
(Reuters/Caren Firouz)

The military industrial complex’s new Iraq hustle

Peter Van Buren
(AP/Charles Dharapak)

America’s George W. Bush disorder: Why our new Iraq war is doomed to fail

Peter Van Buren
Fighters from the Islamic State group parade in Raqqa, Syria. (AP/Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic State group)

7 disastrous possible outcomes of our new war with ISIS

Peter Van Buren
(AP/Jaber al-Helo)

Apocalypse then and now: Why Iraq is America’s greatest quagmire

Peter Van Buren
(Shutterstock larry1235)

How to survive in post-constitutional America

Peter Van Buren
(Shutterstock larry1235)

America entering dangerous new age: The post-constitutional era

Peter Van Buren
Thomas Piketty (Reuters/Benoit Tessier)

9 reasons the American middle class is dying

Peter Van Buren
Thomas Piketty (Reuters/Charles Platiau)

Welcome to Piketty’s America: Dispatches from an empire in decline

Peter Van Buren
(AP)

The glamorous life of a whistleblower: Working a dead-end job for minimum wage

Peter Van Buren
A Qantas 747 aircraft takes off from Sydney airport August 19, 2009. (REUTERS / Tim Wimborne)

No-fly nightmare! Proof that American anti-terror strategy is an illogical, Kafkaesque quagmire

Peter Van Buren
(AP)

Secrets & “spies”: The government’s increasingly dangerous war on whistleblowers

Peter Van Buren
(Shutterstock)

America after the Constitution: Life in the age of drone wars

Peter Van Buren
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