Rebuilding Iraq

Pretty much all the Conservative Commentators are focused on defending President Bush and his statement in the State of the Union. All I have to say is that there is one way to clear this up immediately; find the Weapons of Mass Distruction. If you find them, all these questions melt away.

But Fred Kaplan has written an interesting article on why we need to get the UN involved in the rebuilding of Iraq, and why our Unilateral Plans may not have been entirely successful.

"The problem is not merely that India has refused to honor Bush’s request for 17,000 peacekeeping troops unless the operation is put under U.N. auspices, or that France and Germany made similar refusals (no doubt with barely straight-faced schadenfreude). Nor is it that the “coalition” has failed to muster more than a handful of nations to send more than a few hundred troops on a mission that is straining the powers of 148,000 top-notch American soldiers.

These much-noted embarrassments are but symptoms — logical corollaries — of the underlying problem, which is that Bush and his top advisers deluded themselves into presuming, against all historical precedent, that they could rebuild Iraq on their own in the first place."

Check out the entire article. I hope we get the UN involved sooner rather than later. If no WMD's are found and we continue losing our troops, pressure will mount for President Bush to bring the troops home--better to work on getting the UN in to cushion the blow.