{"id":2275,"date":"2005-08-05T17:14:26","date_gmt":"2005-08-06T00:14:26","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-08-05T17:14:26","modified_gmt":"2005-08-06T00:14:26","slug":"midnight-soccer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/05\/midnight-soccer\/","title":{"rendered":"Midnight Soccer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Put aside, for a moment, all the moral outrage and emotional rancor, and gaze upon the cold, dispassionate truth: whatever else interventionist war might be, there is no denying that it&#8217;s yet another gigantic government project, the kind libertarians and conservatives once instinctively ridiculed. Oh, how times change.<\/p>\n<p>Jim Henley finds this passage in the <I>CS Monitor<\/I>:<\/p>\n<ul>US soldiers trying to create goodwill in Fallujah echo the bitterness. &#8220;We thought we were doing something good when we built a soccer field,&#8221; says Maj. Allen Vaught. &#8220;We brought in engineers, earthmovers, welded goal posts, and trucked in some smooth dirt.&#8221;<br \/>\nThe next day looters took everything. &#8220;Goal posts, nets, and the good dirt. How can you help people who steal dirt?&#8221; he asks incredulously.<\/ul>\n<p>Henley dispatches Vaught&#8217;s assumptions with a shot of Libertarianism 101 and a spoonful of the scorn that used to greet any mention of the phrase &#8220;<a href=http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=cache:9kciKjwYXdUJ:www.clintonfoundation.org\/legacy\/061794-speech-by-president-at-chicago-housing-project.htm+%22midnight+basketball%22+clinton&#038;hl=en>midnight basketball<\/a>.&#8221; I suggest that every time you hear about some civil-society miracle the U.S. government has authored in Iraq, whether a soccer field or a fresh coat of paint on a school, imagine that midnight basketball had been effected in this country at the cost of 25,000-100,000 dead and hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and destroyed property.      <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Put aside, for a moment, all the moral outrage and emotional rancor, and gaze upon the cold, dispassionate truth: whatever else interventionist war might be, there is no denying that it&#8217;s yet another gigantic government project, the kind libertarians and conservatives once instinctively ridiculed. Oh, how times change. Jim Henley finds this passage in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2275"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}