5 Feet of Fury

‘Nation building might work, but it wasn’t worth it’

I was thinking of The Mouse That Roared yesterday, too…

David Harsanyi still not famous enough:

…if every military action in defense of U.S. interests now comes with an obligatory 10-, 20- or 40-year Marshall Plan, you’ve made it even more politically unpalatable. (…)

Doubtlessly it is Islamophobic to bring this up, but Americans are dying, not only in the war on terror, but also to codify Sharia law.

[David] Brooks claims that, in Iraq, “The role of women remains surprisingly circumscribed.” (Surprisingly?) Actually, that’s just a polite way of saying — and I quote directly from the Iraqi Constitution — “Islam is the official religion of the State, and it is a fundamental source of legislation.”

That’s one reason many of us regret our support of the Iraq war. Though I am not reflexively isolationist, I am reflexively suspicious of social engineering. And nation-building is social engineering on the grandest of scales.

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And it wasn’t even a proper Marshall Plan, which, you’ll recall, came AFTER we bombed them into submission. A lot.

Thanks to the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, there will never be another Dresden. Which means there will never be a proper Marshall Plan.