In Peter Van Buren's Huffington Post article, "How Not to Reconstruct Iraq, Afghanistan – or America," he explains how the United States' reconstruction of Iraq should not be a sign of American imperialism. Van Buren also claims that the U.S. Government failed on reconstructing Iraq after the conflict due to the corruption, to the vanity of some companies (contractors and on-the make corporations) and their leaders, and also to the disorganization behind the entire process.
The author argues that even with the enormous amount of money spent on reconstructing Iraq, the Iraqis are still rambling for food around a landscape that does not seem to be reconstructed at all. That is also a claim by the author related to the U.S. Government's mindset attempt to rebuild Iraq without structuring itself properly, with schools that cannot even afford to pay their for their instructors' salary decently, which, according to the author, should not be less important than intervening in another countries issues. In accordance to Van Buren, the idea of rebuilding that area of the Middle East was based on the success of the post-World War II Marshall Plan in Europe and the incredible Japanese economic boom, which left sort of an appearance of imperial expansion; but, as the author points out, the reconstruction of these countries happened due to the high education and industrialization before their destruction during wartime. Another claim by the author is that the United States tried to impose its "American Way" to the countries it has dominated, and in the Iraqi case, that would not be possible because the U.S. culture and lifestyle does not interest those people at all, and that led the whole process to fail. Failure is also entitled to the necessity of imposing standards to a whole different nation assuming that every nation wants to be like the United States, which was proven not to be true.
