In some ways I was a typical American boy of the mid to late 20th Century. I absorbed the lessons: America defeated the Nazis and saved the world. We reconstructed Europe and turned Japan into an economic marvel. I watched the movies, I played the World War Two board games and read all about our military campaigns. I knew veterans of Anzio, of the Bulge, of the Pacific. America could do anything it set its mind to. Vietnam was an aberration. We didn’t have a good reason to be there and we didn’t commit all our resources. We were supposed to have learned from that. Well…some of that history was pure hooey.

But, that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that America can’t do anything it sets its mind to. America keeps setting its mind on doing the wrong things. And we didn’t really learn our lessons from Vietnam. The most important lesson we failed to learn: never commit the troops to a project unless you have a near unanimity within the populace that it is a necessary course. And when you commit, commit totally, using all the assets the nation can bring to bear.

The State Department has just issed a draft plan for future invasions of future countries. It aspires to show America an improved blueprint for managing its imperial plans.

The draft plan reads like a refutation of almost everything the United States has done in Iraq. It also reads like another chapter in the prolonged and bitter debate between the State Department and Pentagon that began during the months before the invasion of Iraq more than three years ago.

Per usual, the State Department remains the most realistic and pragmatic branch of our foreign policy establishment. That just makes it all the more depressing that they just don’t get it.
Here is some of the State Department’s wisdom.

after any future conflicts, the United States should not immediately begin a major rebuilding program.

Instead, it says, the first priorities should be to establish a secure, stable environment and begin political reconciliation. Otherwise, officials said, Washington and any local government that is formed are likely to suffer major political repercussions by making promises that cannot be kept…

Under the new plan, the United States would first establish public security and order, and then encourage small-scale economic activity while promoting political reconciliation. “If that is not done, then the society will unravel at some point,” Mr. Pascual said.

After that, banks, political parties and other institutions would be established, followed by news media, private aid organizations and civilian advocacy groups. Physical reconstruction would begin “only when it seems to fit into the other priorities,” said Mr. Pascual, who is now a vice president of the Brookings Institution. “But the ability to build large-scale infrastructure before you have established order and stability is nil because it will be blown up.”

Of course, a real draft plan would read somewhat differently. It would call for a total mobilization of the country, including a draft, full financing, and the creation of an international coalition blessed with a U.N. (or at least NATO) resolution providing legal justification.

If Iraq was a war that America really needed to fight, we would not need convincing from a group of spin doctors cherry-picking intelligence and ratcheting up a false sense of fear. We would eagerly buy war bonds, and we would volunteer in droves, or even embrace a draft. And we could not be defeated.

The Iraq project is a failure because the nation never agreed it needed to be undertaken, because the administration asked the volunteer military to shoulder the whole burden of the warfighting, and our children to pay the full cost. We were told to go shopping and to be afraid and to support the troops.

A real plan for conquering and reconstructing a foreign country would start with telling us never to attempt it, ever, anywhere, for any reason, unless we are willing to put everything we’ve got into it.

We could have turned Afghanistan into a modern day West Germany. Instead we left it barren and turned Iraq into a hellhole.