During the Clinton administration, nearly all conservatives and libertarians belittled a federal scheme to fund midnight basketball as just another paternalistic boondogle and waste of taxpayers money.

That was then. Over at the libertarian/conservative Volokh Conspiracy, a blog that generally skirts the Iraq issue, David Post puts forward a revised version of the same concept:

A hundred million dollars to build up Iraq's soccer team would do more for nation-building than any other damned thing we could possibly do -- why nobody sees this is totally beyond me.