Building and Nations

AQABA, Jordan -- Iraqi and international officials who gathered Monday to discuss reconstruction in Iraq said the $18.4 billion U.S.-led rebuilding program has failed to provide Iraqis with adequate power, water and sanitation more than two years after the invasion.

Meeting at this Jordanian resort sandwiched between dry desert cliffs and the placid Red Sea, the officials announced $4 billion in loans from Japan and the World Bank to help speed reconstruction.

But the conference also provided an opportunity for a sobering assessment of the effort to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, which was shattered by years of neglect, sanctions and looting. Many officials expressed a belief that the Bush administration has bungled the reconstruction by sending billions to private corporations to tackle major infrastructure projects.

Well of course it has failed, people! Don't you listen to anything? Anybody could have told you that The Administration had no interestin in actually rebuilding a nation. Bush has told us that all along:

Drawing on the advice of Gen. Colin L. Powell, widely viewed as a potential secretary of state in a Bush administration, Bush is far more tentative about committing American troops and rules out their use for what he dismisses as nation building. “There may be some moments when we use our troops as peacekeepers, but not often,” he said in the final presidential debate. In the second debate he suggested a broader philosophical disagreement with Mr. Gore: “I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it’s got to be.’”
-David Sanger, NY Times Oct 30, 2000

Q: What is the role of the U.S. in the world?
BUSH: I’m not sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is the way it’s got to be. I want to empower people. I want to help people help themselves, not have government tell people what to do. I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, we do it this way, so should you. ... I think the United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.
Presidential Debate at Wake Forest University Oct 11, 2000

And, given the opportunity [or rather, making that opportunity], how easily our attitude changes -

As a candidate for the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush insisted that, if elected, he would not allow U.S. military forces to engage in "nation building." No way would he follow President Bill Clinton's foray into nation building in the Balkans, Bush declared. Famous last words.

Now that we have blasted Iraq to save it (does that have a familiar ring?), Bush is in the business of nation building as U.S. military forces struggle to put that broken nation back together. Nation building in Iraq means not only getting the water and electrical supply going and arranging garbage collections.

It also means writing a new constitution and creating a government. In the meantime, U.S. troops are performing basic police functions like directing traffic.

The Bush administration is so eager to run Iraq that it insists on limiting the role of the United Nations to humanitarian relief. After all, who won the war?
-Helen Thomas, April 16 2003

This is a game that both liberal and conservative commentators like to play- pull out a series of old quotes, put them in some kind of demonstrative order with the chronology being made explicit, and let them hang out to dry.

And in fact, much of the failure of the rebuilding of Iraq is out of the US' control- it's a nearly impossible task in many ways. However, the fact that this year the Iraqi power grid produced less power than it was able to last year points to a negative impact of Bush cronyism and corporate contracting in the rebuild.

But the purpose of this is not to point out the hypocracy of The Administration [at least... that's not the only purpose...] but to ask the important question: if we can't fix it, why, again, did we break it...?

Somebody's life is a hell of a lot better because of the corporate rebuilding contracts in the bombed-out craters of Baghdad.

It's just not an Iraqi's.