Ten years ago this week, America went to war in Iraq for the second time. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, but that certainly didn't stop us from invading. Jingoism ran high in the supposedly-liberal press, and only a few voices were raised against the war in Congress. But plenty of others have been rehashing the whole run-up to the Iraq War, and plenty have been busy this week pointing out all the mistakes that were made along the way. I leave all that to others, though, for now. Instead, what I am left thinking ten years after the initial invasion is how badly America's record is when it comes to cleaning up afterwards.

Every time America involves herself in wars in smallish foreign countries, the reconstruction effort is always an afterthought, and is always carried out on a very ad hoc basis. Even the Marshall Plan -- the most successful of all such efforts -- was also thrown together from scratch. Why not, instead, create some sort of "Department of Nation-Building" at the federal level? The phrase does have a lot of negative connotations -- nation-building isn't seen in a very good light these days, but this is precisely why the idea is needed. America hasn't been very successful at nation-building efforts because we enter into each one from scratch, with no real knowledge base of what works and what doesn't.

Imagine America fighting in some future conflict halfway around the world. When the "shock and awe" is over and the occupation of the country is begun, instead of being led by people who have no clue what they are doing, experts would take over and direct reconstruction efforts. Imagine people whose whole lives and careers are centered on creating the nuts and bolts of new societies from the rubble of war or other disaster, and imagine such expertise ready and available to be called on to hit the ground running after some pacification effort or another.

Iraq's reconstruction efforts were, for the most part, a new textbook example of "what not to do." Ineptitude reigned. A final report was just issued by the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, which stated that at least eight billion dollars was wasted in Iraq. That's "at least," mind you -- the report also stated that the final total would doubtless be much higher if every single account were fully audited. That is a whale of a lot of waste and abuse and corruption.

Of course, the idea of planning ahead to avoid incompetence is not really a new one. One of the biggest reasons that the reconstruction of Iraq was such a fiasco was political in nature. The Bush administration sent in very young people who were ideologically pure when it came to setting up a conservative Utopia, but who in reality had no clue what they were doing. Before they did so, they tossed into the garbage can an extensive and well-thought-out framework of how to rebuild Iraq that the State Department had put together. Things would no doubt have been different if this had been used as a blueprint for Iraq rather than Republican dogma.

There's a saying the Irish use to describe what happened back in the 1920s after their war of independence from Britain. "We won the war," they'll tell you, "but we lost the peace." The reasons behind this are many (and unrelated to the subject at hand), but suffice it to say that the phrase works pretty well for quite a number of conflicts America has fought since World War II. We win the warfare part of the struggle, but then we fall down on the job of putting together any sort of representative democracy and working infrastructure in the aftermath. We win the war, and then we go right ahead and lose the peace -- over and over again.

This leaves the rest of the world with the impression of American military might, and also of American governmental incompetence. To bring the impression home, it's like the aftermath of Katrina -- sheer incompetence for no apparent reason other than politics.

But it doesn't have to be this way. While pacifists will decry any attempt to plan for future wars' aftermaths (since they believe such wars should not be fought in the first place), realistically America is going to enter into small-scale conflicts every so often. Planning for the aftermath should be something we do proactively, instead of always reacting afterwards with halfhearted and usually-inept flailing around.

While those in the media who mark the ten year anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq have so far mostly focused on the buildup to war, the war's start, and the occupation which seemed to grind on forever, I consider these issues to be largely over. The American public cheered the war on, the media cheered the war on, and the politicians did nothing to stop it. Later, the public realized that the whole thing was a misadventure and now feels it wasn't really worth the effort in the first place. The dust has settled on the political battles of ten years ago, and not many minds remain left to change over any aspect of the war's justification or prosecution.

But there are still lessons to be learned about the aftermath that are just as valuable to study for the future. Instead of just shoveling money at any contractor with his or her hand out who is making rosy promises, we should professionalize the entire process. This way, people would still make mistakes, but then the next time around such mistakes could be avoided -- by people who had learned from the initial experience. Build on the knowledge we gain each time, rather than just disbanding the whole effort at the end. There's got to be a better way than just throwing together an ad hoc reaction each and every time. People do learn from mistakes, and how America approaches reconstruction efforts obviously has enormous room for improvement. If we didn't have to start from scratch each time, perhaps next time around we won't waste quite as much money, time, or opportunities.

American soldiers die in battle because politicians send them into harm's way. This is not going to change. The lull between wars may vary, but the reality of America claiming superpower status means that such wars will eventually be fought. But if we can field a superpower's professional military effort when we go in to such conflicts, it seems we could also manage to field professionals who know how to deal with the aftermath as well. By doing so, we would raise the rest of the world's opinion of America's competence in general. And, for the countries involved, we could build much stronger and longer-lasting goodwill by competently rebuilding before we leave. This may not be the main lesson to be learned, a decade after we entered Iraq. But it certainly seems like an important one, to me.

-- Chris Weigant

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