Why not, instead, create some sort of "Department of Nation-Building" at the federal level?

Because, that would be, ah, starting from scratch!

An attempt to re-invent the wheel would be another apt phrase for the US Department of Nation-building. Aside from that, it would be completely antithetical to the Obama doctrine and how the US provides effective global leadership.

Much of the expertise in nation-building currently rests within the United Nations and the US would be wise to make use of that expertise and act to strengthen it.

God forbid, should the US find it necessary to act militarily - in Iran or anywhere else - it will need the rest of the world to share in the sacrifice and burdens of war and in the clean-up during the aftermath.

I had the same reaction to Michale's assertion that the world is better off without Saddam. There are many Iraqi's who might argue otherwise and certainly the Israeli's are not better off with an emboldened Iran.

Little in this world is as simple as Michale likes to imagine.

Sadly, I notice that he has not replied to your very thoughtful post.

That's a shame - I thought you might have begun an interesting and intelligent conversation with him.

I think it would be interesting to hear from people who have lived and still live in Iraq since before the war. I think it might be enlightening to hear from the women who are giving birth to deformed babies; to the citizens who are experiencing extremely high rates of cancer due the use of depleted uranium; to the people who get up every day not knowing if a bomb is going to go off, or a suicide bomber is going to walk amongst him or her as he/she tries to get on with his/her life.

I'd be interested to hear how many Iraqi's consider the maimings/tortures/deaths of family members and friends to have been "worth it".

I think that if we could fly in thousands of psychologists to do testing we would find that the entire population is suffering from PTSD. These are people who have endured and are still enduring traumas almost without cessation.

Our "leaders" lied us into intervening forcefully in a complex situation that we proceeded to make a hundred-thousand times worse for people who had absolutely no power to do anything about it.

But of course, who gives a damn about the Iraqi people? What's important is what WE think.

Hmmmm????

Michale

Yes it is..

'Nuff said..

Michale

The United States was the only combatant that didn't come out of the war with an unravaged economy. Continental Europe was in ruins, England soon lost its empire. The US was the world economic behemoth, with real no real competition. Russia could push back in Eastern Europe, but on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the US could and did exert tremendous economic leverage. Not everywhere, but where it most mattered. IMHO, this, rather than the Marshall Plan (which did work out fairly well) was why the outcome of WWII looks rosey to American eyes.

Iraq was a completely different situation, and I don't believe any externally imposed recovery plan would have helped that much, except in the not altogether unimportant category of wasting less US National Treasure.

Iraq was a bad war, fought for the wrong reasons, and fundamentally flawed at the strategic level, even if brilliantly executed at the small unit level. We may not like this, but we better learn from it.

To put that in context, that isn't even HALF the cost of the war.

That doesn't even account for the cost of externalities created by the war (eg. higher price of oil)...