During his election campaign, President Bush said that U.S. troops would not be used for what he called “nation building.”
Despite that, the U.S. military continues to be the premiere nation builder on earth. In Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 150,000 troops -- and a projected price tag of hundreds of billions of dollars – were all devoted to nation building.
While there is not much of a modern track record on nation building, there is Bosnia, where the United States and Europe have been performing a sort of lab experiment in nation building for almost a decade. And they have spent tens of billions of dollars committing thousands of troops.
With the effort to rebuild Iraq barely begun, Correspondent Morley Safer decided to take at Mostar, one small city in Bosnia.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/17/60minutes/main578648.shtml