The US nation builds, that's what it does, from its very beginnings when it built itself, and then rebuilt itself to try and form a "more perfect union", to governing the western territories under military governorship or selected governorship until a time that they were ready to become states, to the military governorships of the Southern States in need of Reconstruction, to the building of the Philippines after the Spanish American War, to the attempts of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti, to Mexico in the 1920s, to Germany and Japan in the 1940s, to South Korea, to the attempt in Vietnam.

Now Iraq.

This is nothing new, the US nation builds, it always has, and always will - nation building is a lucrative business for the US.

actually the only "botched" one you could consider is Vietnam...Mexico works and technically in most Caribbean nations the US just went in to oust someone...and didn't care to fix the mess...so you can hardly call those "botched" since they were hardly attempting to achieve political stability.