Despite the news that Iraq is still a bombed-out economic wreck and that highly-touted conciliatory legislation will actually heighten sectarian conflict, there is good news coming from the country’s entrepeneurial agriculture sector. For the first time in a millennium or two, opium production is flourishing.

The US Government Accountability Office says that reconstruction spending from Iraq’s central government has been vastly overstated by both the Iraqi and US governments. Contrary to assertions from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in September of last year, more than 95% of Iraq’s reconstruction budget remains unspent and efforts to distribute it to the country’s neediest areas are stalled.

Meanwhile, legislation extolled by the Bush administration as a key piece of the national reconciliation effort turns out to be having an opposite effect. The law was ostensibly intended to ease restrictions on government employment of former Ba’ath Party members, who were purged by US proconsul Jerry Bremer from government positions in the post-invasion regime. That action, along with the dissolution of the Iraqi army, helped fuel the anti-US insurgency. The new law appears to actually increase the restrictions on those affected by the purge and even some who weren’t, and was opposed in the Iraqi parliament by the parties representing most former Ba’athists.

Students of The Surge will recall that the escalation of US military action in Iraq was sold on the basis that it would provide Iraqis with the opportunity to move forward on reconstruction and reconciliation. (Well, actually it was sold on the basis that anyone who didn’t support it was a Petraeus-hating feeb, but in theory it was to promote progress on those issues.)

The failure of the reconstruction effort and the Trojan horse reconciliation legislation should put to rest any claims that The Surge worked, but it won’t. Neither will the impending increase in violence. And neither will the news that the Bush administration is now doing for Iraq what it has done for Afghanistan in terms of increasing the economic significance of drug production and smuggling. In Afghanistan, opium production went from near zero prior to the beginning of that adventure—it had been banned by the Taliban in 2000, limiting cultivation to the small slice of the country controlled by our future allies in the Northern Alliance—to year after year of record-setting harvests. In Iraq, which has not been an opium-growing state for centuries, the resilient, profitable and easy to care for crop is beginning to take hold across the southern two thirds of the country as farmers react to the difficulty of competing with cheap agricultural imports while insurgents, militias and crime organizations react to the easy money and the absence of law enforcement threats.

Congratulations, Mr. Bush!

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