So, I’ve finally made my way through about half of the book I borrowed about the Marshall Plan, The Marshall Plan & Its Meaning by Harry Bayard Price. The first few years of the Marshall Plan were about economic cooperation. There was massive planning beforehand to determine how best to get Europe back on its feet.

It seems to me that after the invasion of Iraq there was no (well-publicized, at least) plan to sustain Iraq’s economy. It should’ve been obvious that we needed such a plan beforehand. Firstly, war destroys infrastructure and secondly, Iraq was really hurt by sanctions. Why wasn’t there even a discussion about this? I don’t remember where I read this, but a while back, I remember seeing something about the people not having jobs. We should’ve had some program in place to help Iraq’s economy. But this isn’t something the military can do by itself. That isn’t the job of the military. We needed civilians on the ground. Did the ever-present violence prevent such a thing from ever taking place? I’m no expert on Iraq, but I’m a news junkie and I was never aware of an economic plan for Iraq. Lots of people were aware of the Marshall Plan. It makes me believe that it was a failure of planning, not merely execution.

A solid economy is a necessary foundation for a democratic government, I believe. (Something I will elaborate upon in my discourse.) I think the neocons somehow think democracy is the default condition of man, which it isn’t. If it was, then why has man lived under tyranny for so long and only recently really discovered self-rule? Even if the Iraqis desire freedom, that is insufficient. In this way, the neocon agenda is not conservative at all. There were reasons why the French Revolution didn’t work and there are reasons why Iraq isn’t working, but the neocons have ignored the reasoning at the heart of conservatism. Machiavelli expressed it centuries ago when he wrote, “A people accustomed to living under a prince, if by some accident becomes free, maintains its liberty with difficulty.”

To be honest, it appears to me that the agenda of the neocons is the same as the proponents of world government. Instead, their idea is that America is the world government. America is the executive power of the world with no legislative or judicial checks.

Slowly, some things are beginning to make sense.