Wealth & Money Quote by Peter King

The line does two things at once: it reassures by downgrading Afghanistan’s chaos, then pivots to sell Iraq as a cleaner, more “manageable” project. King’s comparative frame isn’t about geography; it’s about state capacity. “Bureaucracy,” “wealth,” and an “educated class” are presented as infrastructure you can hand a country to, like keys to a preexisting institution. The rhetorical move is classic political permission-making: if the target has the right internal scaffolding, outside intervention becomes less a leap into the unknown and more a technocratic transfer of control.

The subtext is a hierarchy of nations and a hierarchy of suffering. Afghanistan is treated as a place whose baseline is disorder, so “much better than it was” functions as a low bar that excuses lingering instability. Iraq, by contrast, is cast as legible to American policymakers: it has paperwork, oil money, and people who speak the language of governance. That “educated class” phrasing is doing quiet ideological work, suggesting a ready-made partner class that can be elevated to legitimacy - and, implicitly, that the main problem is simply getting the right people into the right offices.

Context matters: this kind of argument flourished in the early post-9/11 era, when Afghanistan was increasingly framed as the “hard” nation-building case and Iraq as the “strategic” one. It’s a confidence pitch with moral implications: if Iraq is “prepared” for takeover, the disruption of invasion can be imagined as temporary turbulence rather than a foundational rupture. The tragedy is how neatly it underestimates what happens when bureaucracy meets occupation: institutions don’t just persist; they fracture, and “positioned to take over” can become “positioned to fight over what’s left.”