The Nation Builder's Victory Lap

George W. Bush is on a farewell visit to the country he liberated this weekend as spoilsports in Washington leak details of a 513-page report showing the American-led reconstruction of Iraq as "a $100 billion failure" caused by "bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure."

The Lame Duck was apparently hoping to limp out of Washington before the bad news came out in February, but the New York Times has it all today as a final Christmas present to a nation already depressed over what happened to the economy on the Bush Administration watch.

In the first 2000 presidential debate, candidate Bush criticized Al Gore as a closet nation-builder: "I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place."

Now we have evidence that his instinct was right in the new federal report titled “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction headed by a Republican lawyer with a staff of engineers and auditors.

According to the Times, it is a "searing critique" of what its director calls the “blinkered and disjointed prewar planning for Iraq’s reconstruction” that led to "the botched expansion of the program from a modest initiative to improve Iraqi services to a multibillion-dollar enterprise."

To the heaping plate of problems that the new President will find on the table January 20th, add the cleaning up of our "success" in Iraq and figuring out how to avoid repeating it in Afghanistan.

Maybe Bush will send him a "Wish you were here" postcard from Baghdad this weekend.

Update: As the President finished his final press conference alongside Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, an Iraq TV journalist threw his shoes at him. Some of us back here know exactly what he was feeling.

Trickle-Down in Iraq

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been walking the streets of Baghdad doling out cash to passersby. Compared to the American millions that have been paid out to tribal leaders or stolen by Iraqi politicians, al-Maliki's largesse is small potatoes, more like the street money paid out by local American pols on election day.

But the irony is that all this free money over there is flowing as American taxpayers prepare to spend billions here to rescue mortgage lenders from defaults of homeowners whose equity has plunged and who can't afford or are unwilling to make their monthly payments.

For the free enterprise enthusiasts of the Bush Administration, there is the huge embarrassment of a government bailout of what private markets are supposed to handle so efficiently and, beyond that, the continuing commitment of billions needed here to a seemingly endless Iraq adventure.

Before he took office, George W. Bush promised voters he would not get involved in nation-building elsewhere, but who have imagined that he would do just that as the nation he is supposed to preserve is crumbling all around him?

Building in Baghdad

The new American embassy in Iraq is a perfect metaphor for our experience there. It’s unfinished, behind schedule, unsafe to occupy, more expensive than expected and, from the start, beset by bungling and possible corruption.

Symbolically, the 21 buildings were intended to move American diplomats from Saddam Hussein’s former palace to a compound secure from bomb, mortar and rocket attacks where they could live and work in relative safety.

But the project has been mismanaged to the point that the more than half-a-billion-dollar budget has ballooned by another $192 million and two key structures will not be finished before 2009.

Now, as with everything else in Iraq, Congress is trying to find out what went wrong. The myriad of questions include:

*Why the Washington official overseeing the project has been barred from Iraq by Ambassador Ryan Crocker,

*Why formaldehyde fumes in a facility built to house embassy guards by a Kuwaiti contractor and a faulty electrical system installed by a former Halliburton subsidiary have made it unsafe to open,

*Why offices to house Gen. David Petraeus and his staff are now being reconfigured to safeguard classified material at an additional cost of $14.7 million.

Like nation-building in Iraq, construction of the largest U.S. embassy in the world is not going well. State Department officials, with their Blackwater security guards, are going to be spending an unpredictable amount of time, money and human lives trying to get it right.