"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana, Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 284
Foreign Policy: Lessons of the Past, by Minxin Pei: ..... According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has conducted more than 200 military interventions abroad since its founding. Sixteen of these interventions, or about 8 percent, can be categorized as nation-building attempts. These missions have three characteristics. First, their practical goal was to achieve regime change or the survival of a regime that would have otherwise collapsed. (As in Iraq, creating or restoring democracy was not the original mission objective. Rather, core U.S. security and economic interests were the principal drivers of U.S. interventions.) Second, American nation-building efforts typically required that a large number of ground troops be deployed to provide security and basic services. Third, U.S. military and civilian personnel were active in post-conflict political administration. Such deep U.S. involvement in the political life of the target nations allowed Washington to select friendly leaders, influence policy, and restructure institutions.
If we judge these nation-building attempts by whether they created durable democratic regimes after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the results are sobering. Of the 16 attempts (see facing page), only four (Japan, Germany, Panama in 1989, and Grenada in 1983) qualify as successes. In these four countries, democracy, as measured by the widely used Polity democracy index maintained at the University of Maryland, was sustained 10 years after U.S. troops left. In the other 11 countries (excluding Afghanistan), democracy failed to emerge or endure during the same time frame. Worse, in the countries where U.S. nation-building efforts foundered, brutal dictatorships and corrupt, autocratic regimes gained power after the U.S. exit. This record implies a success rate of 26 percent (four out of 15 attempts)
The successes are also highly distinguishable, for the most part. In both Japan and Germany, not only had civil society been almost utterly and completely destroyed, but there was plainly nobody else in the world that really could manage any sort of direct administration. The only largely undestroyed areas were the Americas, and most South American countries simply didn't have the military resources for that sort of large scale administration (and considering US racial views at the time, we'd never have allowed all those brown people to have control over white Europeans, in any event). Both Japan and Germany were also ethnically more uniform than Iraq, and neither ethnic nor religious pressures provided internal desires to pull the countries apart permanently -- Germany's partition came about entirely through external forces. One would also point out that Grenada, at least, was nominally democratic in the first place; Reagan just didn't like the fact that they had elected a communist as their leader. One would also point out that in 1989, we didn't attempt to administer Panama at all; we played loud music at their dictator until he surrendered, stuck around long enough to make sure that the Canal wasn't going to go up in smoke or some such, and then we left pretty damn quickly.
This administration could hardly have gotten off to a worse start in nationbuilding in Iraq. (We'll just ignore Afghanistan for the moment, shall we? After all, they are.) A few weeks ago, the administration made a major misstep when it cancelled local elections in Iraq. Allowing people local administration might well have produced some amount of patience with the US' groping towards some method of direct national administration that worked. Instead, they created even more resentment and hostility by cancelling elections which would have allowed Iraqis to have (or at least feel they had) some voice, some control over their own lives.
To date, direct administration of Iraq clearly isn't working. The military is overstretched and clearly unable to do the peacekeeping work for which it was never trained, and the administrators are isolated behind the walls of one of Saddam's palaces. (And they could not have chosen a worse place, in terms of symbolism, than that. It may well be the only place that's defensible in the city, but then, the interim administration should not ostensibly be thinking of defensibility above all else.)
The most likely mode of administration to function at all well might well be a UN-sanctioned and led approach. Unfortunately, although such an approach stands a moderately better chance of working, it's also an approach that this administration is unlikely to embrace any time soon. Having blown off the UN to wage this war in the first place, they're unlikely to go back, hat in hand, and say, "We're out of our depth. Please help." The UN is also likely to demand -- not unreasonably -- that having done most of the physical destruction, the US pay for most of the physical reconstruction. They're also likely to demand that the UN take over the awarding of reconstruction contracts, which will end the administration's ability to steer them to their old cronies. Even if, by some miracle, the administration decided to work with the UN, they would insist on maintaining control of the mission -- the US has never submitted its soldiers to direct UN control -- and under these circumstances, the UN itself might understandably decline that condition; after all, if the US were actually able to accomplish anything useful by maintaining control, we wouldn't look to the UN for anything, now would we? Thus, at least in the near term, the administration is not likely to work with the UN. The administration is also not going to want to lose face, as they will see it, before the elections by asking the UN for anything, especially since France, with its anachronistic veto, and Germany will be on the Security Council and will be helping shape its decisions on the issue. Therefore, our military and the Iraqis will simply sit and bleed, at least through the November 2004 elections. (The sad part is, if the administration just sucked it up and went to the UN now, it's likely that by the time the elections rolled around, things would be more stable. At the very least, to be entirely cynical about it, other nations' soldiers would be sharing in the one-a-day death rate, which would likely reduce the number of American soldiers who died, which would reduce that specific pressure on the administration. Unless, of course, the guerillas made specific efforts to target Americans, which they well might.)
Posted by iain at July 22, 2003 01:01 PMComments
