An important rule of counterinsurgency is, Gifts that the recipient does not want, or does not need, will never win "hearts and minds."
Case in point: a $38 million accounting system for the Iraqi government, which for the last year, no one in the Finance Ministry is using. Obviously, the Finance Ministry needs accounting. However, it wasn't necessarily ready for state-of-the-art accounting software. Or, perhaps, the problem was the fashion in which American contractors and officials delivered this system, which failed to convince Finance Ministry's employees that this particular system would work for them.
Either way, $38 million is a lot of money to waste learning a basic lesson about "hearts and minds."
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