When the U.S. government needed a blueprint for rebuilding Japan after World War II, they looked not within the American military-industrial complex, but to a cultural anthropologist named Ruth Benedict. “The choice to rely so heavily on cultural anthropologists in the rebuilding of a defeated enemy has particular resonance now as the United States struggles to rebuild a stable and viable Iraq, a country that, like Japan, is seen as both impossibly foreign and forbidding.” The idea of rebuilding a foreign nation without a deep and abiding knowledge of and respect for its culture seems risky at best, but there seem to be few Ruth Benedicts around to help with the current mess in Iraq. Or, perhaps more accurately, if they do exist, no one’s asking for their help.