Why Does Robert Novak Hate America?

First he publicly discloses the name of a covert CIA operative, and now this?

Americans are not good at nation-building.

Any real American knows - we're good at everything.

Seriously, though, the issue isn't that we're "not good at nation building". The issue, which Novak is attempting to conceal behind a clould of smoke, is that the Bush Administration has been top-to-bottom incompetent in relation to every aspect of its Iraq war strategy. Had it wished to do so, it could have listened to the scholars and State Department experts who were warning it of the difficulty of nation building, and could have heeded their advice as to how it might be achieved (and also to their warnings as to the consequences of failure). But that would have meant revising their war plans, developing a much larger occupation force, giving up the rapid privatization and flat taxation plan they wished to impose on "liberated Iraq", and admitting to the American public that the war and occupation would be extremely costly and would involve a very long commitment.

Thanks to an incompetent Administration, editorially backed by Novak and his ilk, we got the extremely costly war and long commitment, with little else to show for it.