To Sir With Love - A Wesley Clark Blog

Talking Points Memo: "We're rebuilding Iraq because we don't know what else to do with ourselves."

Josh Marshall offers a somewhat different and disturbing perspective on the administration's compulsion to lavish compassionately conservative largesse on "rebuilding Iraq."

If you go back to last fall, or even the early months of this year, there was plenty of talk about reconstruction in Iraq. But if you look closely most of the talk was about social and political reconstruction: building a free press, purging the army of Baathists, creating the building blocks of a rule-of-law society, and so forth.

There was precious little talk about rebuilding their stuff, i.e., the physical infrastructure of the country -- bridges, schools, telephones, electrical grids, all up to western standards.

Certainly, there was a recognition that we'd need to rebuild stuff that we broke in the course of prosecuting the war. But the entire focus of reconstruction underwent a wholesale transformation in the months after the war.

The reason for this, I think, is that we very quickly found out, on entering the country, that the social and political reconstruction task was vastly harder than the planners of the war had anticipated, and that they were woefully underprepared for it. That left them scrambling for a new raison d'etre for the war, a new justification for what we were doing there. What we came up with was rebuilding their stuff. Of course, fat cats of all varieties were ready on hand to enable this drift in policy. And needless to say, most already had the president's ear.

Building bridges and schools can be terribly expensive. But it's something we know how to do and something that shows concrete results. Building civil society can be, to paraphrase Bolivar, like plowing the sea.

So let me see if I've got this right:

We elected a compassionate conservative who has underfunded even his own signature programs, such as "Leave No Child Behind."

We are governed by a majority party which has traditionally stood for fiscal responsibility, yet supported the highest deficits in history.

We were led into war by an adminstration at odds with itself on pretexts which have been disproven, yet which for reasons of political expediency, it is happy to have the electorate continue to believe.

And finally, a president who derided nation-building in every sense before his election is insisting we spend $20B because Iraq shows no signs of becoming another Orange County any time in the foreseeable future.

There oughta be a law.