Midnight Soccer

Put aside, for a moment, all the moral outrage and emotional rancor, and gaze upon the cold, dispassionate truth: whatever else interventionist war might be, there is no denying that it's yet another gigantic government project, the kind libertarians and conservatives once instinctively ridiculed. Oh, how times change. Jim Henley finds this passage in the CS Monitor:

US soldiers trying to create goodwill in Fallujah echo the bitterness. "We thought we were doing something good when we built a soccer field," says Maj. Allen Vaught. "We brought in engineers, earthmovers, welded goal posts, and trucked in some smooth dirt." The next day looters took everything. "Goal posts, nets, and the good dirt. How can you help people who steal dirt?" he asks incredulously.

Henley dispatches Vaught's assumptions with a shot of Libertarianism 101 and a spoonful of the scorn that used to greet any mention of the phrase "midnight basketball." I suggest that every time you hear about some civil-society miracle the U.S. government has authored in Iraq, whether a soccer field or a fresh coat of paint on a school, imagine that midnight basketball had been effected in this country at the cost of 25,000-100,000 dead and hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and destroyed property.