By now most of us recognize that the elephant in the china shop is what broke the china and that getting the elephant out is the first step, but that there is still the china to fix or replace or make restitution for. In this case, the china is life and blood that has been spilled — Iraqi and American blood — plus the whole infrastructure of Iraqi society, plus the infrastructure of the US Army.

The recent plan, as detailed in the New York Times (“In a Force for Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict”) is to put Sunni militias on the US payroll and create a job corps program like what FDR did for America:

The Americans, meanwhile, are handing out hundreds of million of dollars in aid and reconstruction funds — $223 million to Ramadi and its surrounding areas alone since February. As a result, a dizzying number of sheiks have stepped forward in recent months claiming to be important leaders who fought Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and now deserve money, water plants, new schools and hundreds of jobs for their relatives.

Can you believe it? On one hand, the recognition that there is rebuilding to do; on the other hand, a rebuilding that involves paying 1/2 of the civil war to do what the other 1/2, which is also being paid by the US, doesn’t want to do. The Sunnis, who were ousted by the US as Saddamists, are being paid to run militias; the Shiites, who were put in power by the US, are being paid to run the government. If this isn’t evidence of insanity and incompetence, I don’t know what those words mean.

To make matters more bizarre, compare the money and programs that are needed to take care of the aftermath of Iraq — including the ongoing health care that will be required for the rest of some soldiers’ lives — with the collapse of local economies across the US. The collapse of the Fed-inspired housing bubble, combined with the loss of revenue from Bush tax cuts for the rich, are squeezing the life out of American towns and cities. The NYTimes reported on that in two articles (“Taxes Are Reassessed in Housing Slump”; “This Is the Sound of a Bubble Bursting”).

Notice the similarity between what’s happening in Iraq and America for people at the grassroots:

In the US: “People that might not normally resort to crime see no other option,” says Mike Scott, the [Lee County, Florida] county sheriff. “People have to have money to feed their families.”

In Iraq: “We have a lot of unemployment, and anyone, if he doesn’t have a job, takes even a job where he does bad things to provide for his family,” Mr. Saleh [a former colonel in Mr. Hussein’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence service] said.

As all the king’s men and all the king’s horses try to put Iraq back together again, America itself is becoming another Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall.