What’s Wrong With U.S. National-Building

In the first 11 months of its Iraq deployment, the Fourth Infantry Division’s Third Brigade Combat Team spent $72 million on public works projects in just one Baghdad suburb. That’s roughly equivalent to one year of U.S. foreign aid to the entire country of Botswana, but merely a rounding error in the U.S. military’s massive outlay of development dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Armed Humanitarians, freelance defense correspondent Nathan Hodge sets out to explain how and why the Pentagon embraced the once-dreaded business of nation-building, and the “tectonic shift” that this new mission portends for American foreign policy. Hint: It’s not good news.