Wealth & Money Quote by John Conyers

Conyers frames reconstruction as an urgent, almost procedural next step: once the shooting stops, the paperwork should start. The line reads like a humanitarian reflex, but its real force is political. By anchoring everything to "once the violence has ceased", he signals both impatience with war and an implicit critique of the actors prolonging it. There is an unspoken accusation here: that destruction is not just tragic but policy-shaped, and therefore repair is also a policy choice.

The sentence is engineered to shift responsibility upward and outward. "The US should immediately call on the World Bank and other international institutions" casts Washington not as a passive bystander but as the switchboard operator of global recovery. It also launders American leadership through multilateral legitimacy: if reconstruction is organized via the World Bank and a donors conference, it looks like the world acting together rather than the US acting alone. That matters in a Middle East context where unilateral US action is radioactive and where "help" can be read as leverage.

The subtext of "donors conference" is especially telling. Aid becomes a stage-managed coalition, a way to monetize moral urgency into pledges, photo ops, and conditionality. Lebanon is described as "shattered infrastructure" rather than shattered politics, shattered sovereignty, or shattered lives, narrowing the crisis into something technocratic and solvable. Conyers is arguing for compassion, yes, but also for a particular kind of postwar order: rebuild the roads and power grids quickly, stabilize the state, and prevent the vacuum that turns ceasefires into sequels.