Five Years in Iraq | Commentary by William PFAFF

Flikr photo by Hayden used under a Creative Commons License.   What has happened to American exceptionalism?  Have we become exceptionally arrogant to think we can “change the world in America’s image.”  Taken on their own, these words spoken by Condoleezza Rice, reprinted in “The Question of American Incompetence,” by William Pfaff, seem almost absurd.  The recent release of “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), details the $100 billion failure of U.S. efforts to build a secure democratic state in Iraq.  In his article, Pfaff lists the ingredients for American Incompetence in Iraq – “ignorant assumptions, waste, organizational chaos, bureaucratic and personal rivalries, lies, and incompetence.” Neo-conservative arrogance about what democratic state-building might entail was based on historic miscalculations that likened reconstruction efforts in Japan and Germany with efforts to democratize “rouge” or “failed” states, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.  Along with errors of judgment in the War on Terror, the downfalls of American-style capitalism – as the result of corruption on Wall Street and the liquidity crisis – make Pfaff’s question a compelling one.  Finally, Pfaff recommends the following inscription to be branded across the entrance to the National Security Council, taken directly from the SIGAR report:

Five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the U.S. government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity not the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program.