Build that Flat

Thinking about the buyer's remorse many officials are showing about the war in Iraq has got me thinking about some of the things I teach. Often while grading an assignment where someone has estimated the labor or materials for a particular project, shall we say, optimistically I sometimes hear myself uttering a challenge... "Build that flat!"

From time to time now I get the feeling that the biggest problem the US has in the middle east is a complete and utter failure of production planning. That the rest of the world is sitting there smirking at us saying "Ok W, build that flat."

The national arrogance we displayed coming into the war has really put us in a spot now. We told the rest of the world that they didn't matter and that we could do this thing by ourselves. Now, well now we have to.

What country in their right mind would step in to help us now? Even if the Bush administration could put themselves in a place where they could admit a mistake and could admit we need the help, and could actually go through the process of asking I find it very unlikely we'd get any takers.

Talking head after talking head on TV has been saying "we need to bring in the world community." Unfortunately I think its likely we missed that chance. Now we're really in a crack. We have got to succeed. If we don't then whatever credibility we had before will be gone - oh, and we will be leaving things a bigger mess than we found them. And we're not going to get much help to do it. Its going to be both interesting and terrible to watch what we have to do to get it right. We've already sunk our military, and started to mortgage our federal budget - can a draft be too far behind?

Even if people don't support the reason we went to war, and even if they don't want to put more resources at risk, there is too much at stake - both there and here. If we want for the next 50 years to be the United States we have been for the past 50 years then we cannot allow Iraq to become a failed state. Snow job or no snow job we're committed. Without a change of administration we're going to be committed alone. I am as angry and opposed to our behavior so far as anyone, and I understand the impulse to call for investigations and try to accomplish a little CYA, but what everyone - the people, the media, the pentagon, and the government as a whole - must realize, and the sooner the better is that it is our mess. We broke it, its on us to fix it. Whatever the cost.