This article argues that reconstruction is an emerging discourse of international politics that merges security and development discourses in powerful and troubling ways. We focus on Iraq as a site for articulating and institutionalising a particular version of reconstruction, uncovering five narratives that constitute Iraqi reconstruction discourse. We conclude by suggesting that reconstruction repackages security and development into a singular, technical, and bureaucratic worldview. This view obscures working and reliable solutions to poverty and instability by treating development as a central justification for war, and war as a promising way to develop a state and society.