Bush, Iraq, Obama, Afghanistan, and journalistic shoes

Someone has finally treated George W. Bush with the respect he deserves.

The treatment: two shoes thrown at his head. The someone: a certain Muntadar al-Zaidi, opinionated journalist of refined aim, if rather unsophisticated expression. "This is a farewell kiss! … Dog, dog!" he bellowed at Bush as he hurled the symbolic footwear, one after another.

"Throwing a shoe at someone," reports the Washington Post in a story I hope will trigger a 30-day stampede of American shoe-throwing, "is considered the worst possible insult in Iraq and is meant to show extreme disrespect and contempt."

I can't imagine a more fitting dénouement for Bush, for Iraqis, for us. But just as one miserable chapter of American interventionism inches -- maybe -- toward a close, another is ominously in the making.

"Bush told reporters that the mission in Afghanistan was 'the same' as the one in Iraq." And generally when the mission is the same, the available means of execution don't radically differ, despite the best of intentions.

So what better time for the leaking of "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," a 513-page history of America's unreconstructed guazzabuglio of swinish stupidity, as painfully pieced together by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

"The manuscript," reports the New York Times, it being one of the two outlets to which the findings were leaked (ProPublica being the other), "is based on approximately 500 new interviews, as well as more than 600 audits, inspections and investigations on which [the I.G.'s] office has reported over the years."

And just what does the manuscript depict? Well, I can tell you precisely what it depicts: In fact, I could have told you years ago -- as in further fact I did, as did millions of others -- precisely what, in time, it would depict.

It "depicts," according to the Times, "an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure."

It depicts a nation-rebuilding effort that has been "chaotic and often poisonous"; is a paradigm of "deception, waste and poor planning"; has witnessed a "botched expansion"; has seen "endless revisions and reversals"; has operated by "the seat of [its] pants"; and, in general, says the I.G., has been "blinkered and disjointed" from beginning to elusive end.

Moving from the general to particulars, however, we find, for instance, that "a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan" -- which "amounted to a parallel reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of the American effort."

As for reconstruction projects being conducted by locals, those are, you might say, somewhat Blagojevichian in design, with "money … divided up by a spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs." Or, as an American diplomat put it with an alternative American-way twist: "Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of [his neighborhood], in terms of controlling resources. 'You will use my contractor or the work will not get done.'"

But what, one might ask, of all the hoopla and hosannas stemming from the Petraeus and post-Petraeus success? "Among the overarching conclusions of the [I.G.'s] history is that [after] five years … the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake" a successful reconstruction program.

Permit me to translate that passage: Given Iraq's infrastructural shambles and stubbornly persistent, native governance by criminality, favoritism and the most astonishing incompetence, violence will, in time, once again reign.

Yet that's not the scariest part. A damn shame, for sure, and historically rueful, no doubt, but "scary" implies contemporaneity. And here it comes, as dropped suggestively into the above story by the Times: "Troop levels and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan are likely to be stepped up under the new administration."

Oh, but this time we'll get it right, of that I'm equally sure -- or should I say, of that the new administration is sure, beginning with its confidence in a 20,000-troop escalation.

Now would be a good time for Mr. Obama to start practicing his ducking.