Mr. Van Buren himself describes the project as “career suicide,” though, for now, he continues to work in human resources at the State Department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters.

NOW 51, married with two daughters and living in Virginia, he has been in the Foreign Service for 23 years, with postings around the world. According to his biography in the book, he was honored for his work after the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, and he worked extensively with the military in previous assignments in Asia and at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where he participated in a Marine Corps field exercise meant to simulate conditions in Iraq.

In short, he hardly seemed the type of Foreign Service officer to go rogue, but he has an impish eye for the absurd and a common-sensical attitude that was deeply frustrated in the political-military bureaucracy that had evolved in Iraq by the time he arrived in 2009.

He served in two of the State Department’s provincial reconstruction teams, or P.R.T.’s, in the alphabet soup parlance of the Global War on Terror (G-WOT). The P.R.T.’s were created in 2006 to shift the focus of the American war effort at least in part beyond the barrel of a gun.

The teams, embedded in bleak, sand-clogged military bases, consisted of diplomats, specialists from the Departments of Justice or Agriculture and contractors, all well paid if not always, in his view, necessarily qualified for the task at hand.

“Nobody seemed happy,” he writes in a typical passage of Thanksgiving dinner inside the dining facility (D-FAC) at his base, one of two on the southern outskirts of Baghdad where he worked, “but everyone did get a lot of food, though like our reports of success, much was ladled out while little was swallowed.”

The passage echoes his main complaint: The day-to-day reconstruction projects, he argues, were done as much to satisfy the bureaucratic need to demonstrate measurable progress as actually to make measurable progress.