Pat gets an honest no-prize for bringing us news of a new report on how the Iraq reconstruction effort was handled:

In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program.

The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the "ambiguous legal status" of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO.

Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document...

The parallels between this and essentially every other reconstruction effort the US has ever tried, from Vietnam to Korea to Japan and Germany to the American South right back to the Revolutionary war itself is quite striking. Judged against our own expectations, America hasn't done a very good job of this sort of thing, ever. Then again, when one considers the current status of all these countries with which we have meddled after an armed conflict and then compares them with, say, the stewardships of France or Spain, we perhaps have not done so badly after all.

There are even echoes of this sort of incompetence and back-biting in the records of far older conflicts such as the Peloponnesian and Persian wars of ancient Greece. Nation-building by consensus would seem to be a messy, inefficient process fraught with hidden expense and danger.

Which is to say, it is essentially like any other complex human endeavour which requires very large numbers of people and very large sums of money to complete. This is not unusual, this is normal. Little surprise then that the New York Times presents these findings as new and startling, as I'm sure will every other mainstream media outlet. "Man bites dog" reporting at its finest.

“Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.” -- Werner Von Braun