But this is not being framed as a lie by omission, rather, a bunch of good reasons (that I support) were made, when the real reason was nation building. Or so

But this is not being framed as a lie by omission, rather, a bunch of good reasons (that I support) were made, when the real reason was nation building. Or so is the claim, which DenBeste is acknowledging in the cited item. And nation building is a very different sort of task, although I'll note we actually were successful at "re-building" the leadership, officer corps, and general relationship with the US in South Vietnam ... before we cut them off at the knees during the North's 2nd massive armored invasion (the first the ARVN with US air support destroyed, 40,000 out of the 150,000 NVA committed managing to make it back north without their equipment, the latter detail BTW helping to bankrupt the USSR). But we didn't try to change the nature of that society, and I don't think we did with Japan, there we just tried to suppress a few specific things that weren't integral to it and the way it functioned, and encourage some others, many of which were reasonably aligned with Japanese mores. Germany doesn't even count in this list as far as I'm concerned, and South Korea, that would mostly be by example and nudging, given that both of us are still in an official state of war with the DPRK, something the latter reminds us of with fire and blood fairly often. Whereas trying to make a Muslim Arab country essentially neither? Yeah, right, especially with the sectarian issues, e.g. Shia majority, Sunni once and hope to be future rulers, and the Kurds to the north. And it's not at all clear Bush and many of his advisers ever had a clear and/or correct view of all this ("Islam is a religion of peace"), and that's before the fumbles. You have to, among other things, factor in that Bremer was no MacArthur, wasn't even the LBJ/Nixon types who retrieved the situation from JFK's "Best and Brightest", and couldn't operate with the same freedom of action, especially compared to the WWII examples, for both the circumstances, and the media and political situation changed. E.g. "Vietnam was the first war broadcast on TV".