Open thread for night owls: Reconstruction and how not to do it at home and abroad

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. At TomDispatch he writes, How Not to Reconstruct Iraq, Afghanistan'or America:

Some images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion American taxpayers put up to 'reconstruct' that country, were horses living semi-wild among the muck and garbage of Baghdad. Those horses had once raced for Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and seven years after their 'liberation' by the American invasion of 2003, they were still wandering that unraveling, unreconstructed urban landscape looking, like many other Iraqis, for food.
Peter Van Buren
I flew home that same day, a too-rapid change of worlds, to a country in which the schools of my hometown in Ohio could not afford to pay teachers a decent wage. Once great cities were rotting away as certainly as if they were in Iraq, where those horses were scrabbling to get by. To this day I'm left pondering these questions: Why has the United States spent so much money and time so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad, while allowing its own infrastructure to crumble untended? Why do we even think of that as 'policy'? [...]

Now, it's definitive. Reconstruction in Iraq has failed. Dismally. The U.S. couldn't even restore the country's electric system or give a majority of its people potable water. The accounts of that failure still pour out. [...]

Americans have always worn their imperialism uncomfortably, even when pursuing it robustly. The British were happy to carve out little green enclaves of home, and to tame -- brutally, if necessary -- the people they conquered. The United States is different, maybe because of the lip service politicians need to pay to our founding ideals of democracy and free choice.

We're not content merely to tame people; we want to change them, too, and make them want it as well. Fundamentalist Muslims will send their girls to school, a society dominated by religion will embrace consumerism, and age-old tribal leaders will give way to (U.S.-friendly, media-savvy) politicians, even while we grow our archipelago of military bases and our corporations make out like bandits. It's our way of reconciling Freedom and Empire, the American Way. Only problem: it doesn't work. Not for a second. Not at all. Nothing. Nada.

From this point of view, of course, not spending 'reconstruction' money at home makes perfect sense. Detroit, et al., already are us. Free choice is in play, as citizens of those cities 'choose' not to get an education and choose to allow their infrastructure to fade. From an imperial point of view it makes perfectly good sense. Erecting a coed schoolhouse in Kandahar or a new sewer system in Fallujah offers so many more possibilities to enhance empire. The home front is old news, with growth limited only to reviving a status quo at huge cost.

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