Is it too late to learn lessons for the future of Iraq?

Abstract

A wide range of efforts has been offered on ‘winning the peace’ in Iraq. This article examines the judgements of several comparative studies on post-conflict nation-building, and it introduces 1990s Russia as an additional source of ‘lessons learned’. Beyond the widely recommended attention to the large and small technical tasks in the areas of security, democracy, administrative capacity, and economic reconstruction, this paper points to the importance of dynamics such as a real and lasting commitment by the United States and the coalition, the emergence of widely supported and particularly talented Iraqi leadership, and increased evidence of ‘learning’ among Iraqi elites and masses and among the coalition and international community.

Acknowledgements

This article's author is indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable advice, and to Joan Barth Urban, Wallace Thies, and James O'Leary for earlier assistance on Germany, Japan, and Russia. Very special thanks also go to Mary Card, John Quirk, Matthew Yandura, and all those who serve(d) in MNF-Iraq.

Notes

1. James Dobbins, ‘Nation-Building: The Inescapable Responsibility of the World's Only Superpower’, RAND Review, Vol.27, No.2 (Summer 2003).

2. Francis Fukuyama, panelist, ‘The US and UN Roles in Nation-Building: A Comparative Analysis’, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 18 February 2005.

3. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

4. Excellent resources on these include, among others, Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and a series of edited volumes by Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner, including Democracy After Communism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Global Resurgence of Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 1996), and Global Divergence of Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Diamond served as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

5. See, for example, Robert Kagan, ‘Iraq: The Day After’, Washington Post, 21 July 2002; Michael Ignatieff, ‘Nation-Building Lite’, New York Times, 28 July 2002; Thomas Friedman, ‘Iraq Without Saddam’, 1 September 2002; James Fallows, ‘The Fifty First State’, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2002; Joseph Nye, ‘Ill-Suited for Empire’, Washington Post, 23 May 2003; Niall Ferguson and Laurence Kotlikoff, ‘Going Critical: American Power and the Consequences of Fiscal Overstretch’, The National Interest, Fall 2003; and Charles Maier and John Dower, panelists, ‘Looking at Germany, Japan and Iraq’, Harvard University, 3 March 2004.

6. The works most relied on for this review include: Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario (US Army War College, Carlisle, Pa., Feb. 2003); Ray Salvatore Jennings, The Road Ahead: Lessons in Nation-Building from Japan, Germany, and Afghanistan for Post-war Iraq, (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, Peaceworks No. 49, April 2003); Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper, Lessons from the Past: The American Record on Nation Building (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Policy Brief 24, May 2003); James Dobbins et al., America's Role in Nation-Building (Santa Monica, Ca.: Rand, 2003); James Dobbins et al., The UN's Role in Nation-Building (Santa Monica, Ca.: Rand, 2005); Robert Orr, ed., Winning the Peace: An American Strategy for Post-Conflict Reconstruction (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2004); Kimberly Zisk Marten, Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2004); Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004); Zalmay Khalilzad, ‘How to Nation-build’, The National Interest (Summer 2005); Daniel Byman, ‘Constructing a Democratic Iraq: Challenges and Opportunities’, International Security 28:1 (Summer 2003); Eva Bellin, ‘The Iraqi Intervention and Democracy in Comparative Historical Perspective’, Political Science Quarterly 119:4 (Winter 2004/2005).

7. Significant and lasting commitments of ‘time, manpower and money’ are cited identically in Crane and Terrill, Reconstructing Iraq, and in Dobbins et al., America's Role in Nation-Building.

8. Douglas Porch, for example, dismissed Iraq as having ‘a people susceptible to hysteria and fanaticism’ and ‘a ruling class that inclines toward demagogy and corruption’ incapable of generating a Yoshida or Adenauer, in ‘Occupational Hazards: Myths of 1945 and US Iraq Policy’, The National Interest (Summer 2003).

9. More broadly, however, the World Bank introduced a collection of papers on the future of development assistance by judging that ‘the evidence supporting the positive impact of aid is shaky at best’; <http://rru.worldbank.org/PapersLinks/Development-Assistance>.

10. The efforts of the Center for Strategic and International Studies which produced Orr's Winning the Peace also contributed to the creation of the new Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization.

11. The Mozambique narrative is summarized in Dobbins et al., The UN's Role in Nation-Building, pp.93–106.

12. Except where noted, the emphasis here is generally on the Boris Yeltsin era, 1992–1999, comparable in length to the post-war occupations.

13. The notion of integration, an uncertain and long-term process by which pairs or groups of states cross the ‘threshold’ beyond which violence in conflict resolution is effectively abandoned, is best detailed in Karl W. Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).

14. This journal published an important discussion of American motives and the international order: Andrea Kathryn Talentino, ‘US Intervention in Iraq and the Future of the Normative Order’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol.25, No.2 (August 2004), pp.312–38.

15. See, for example, the importance of the ideas of Richard Perle (chairman, Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, 2001–2003) in ‘Iraq: Saddam Unbound’ in Robert Kagan and William Kristol (eds), Present Dangers (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), and of Paul Wolfowitz (Bush's deputy secretary of defense, 2001–2005) writings like ‘Iraqi Rebels with a Cause’, New Republic, 7 December 1998.

16. For an elaboration on early difficulties and early critics, see Robert Wolfe (ed.), Americans as Proconsuls: United States Military Government in Germany and Japan, 1944–1952 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). See also T.A. Bisson, Prospects for Democracy in Japan (New York: Macmillan, 1949). On evaluating progress, see Kazuo Kawai, Japan's American Interlude (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960), p.182.

17. Wolfe, Americans as Proconsuls, pp.396, 422.

18. O'Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, described the democratization processes in Latin America as ‘nonlinear, uncertain, and reversible’ and ‘satisficing’ [a mix of satisfaction and sacrificing].

19. The same criticisms were detailed in 2002 as in the 1990s: underfunding, insufficient cooperation between the United States and Russia, and insufficient cooperation between each country's own agencies. See, for example, a summary of the panel on ‘Reshaping US-Russian Threat Reduction’, Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference, 14–15 November 2002, on the website of the Center for Defense Information, <www.cdi.org/russia/232-8.cfm>.

20. More accurately, the Japanese prime ministers had the support of the Liberal Party, Democratic Party or a coalition of the two from 1948 to 1955, when the two parties merged to form the Liberal Democratic Party.

21. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999), pp.444–5.

22. Graham T. Allison and Grigory Yavlinksy, Window of Opportunity: The Grand Bargain for Democracy in the Soviet Union (New York: Pantheon, 1991).

23. William Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy: Russian Elite and Mass Perspectives, 1993–2000 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 25, 179.

24. On ‘elite transformations’ as the ‘fulcrum for fundamental political change’, see Michael Burton and John Higley, ‘The Study of Political Elite Transformations’, International Review of Sociology, Vol.11, No.2 (2001), p.182. Elites can include political elites but also leaders in civil service, military, business, unions, media, intelligentsia and large civic or religious organizations. See also Higley and Burton, ‘Types of Political Elites in Post-Communist Eastern Europe’, International Security, Vol.22, No.1 (June 1997), p.154.

25. See, for example, Anders Aslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy, (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1995), p.220, and Yegor Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory (trans. Jane Ann Miller, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), p. 152.

26. Kawai, Japan's American Interlude, pp.179–82.

27. Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy, pp.98–101, 185. Looking ahead, one might be concerned not only about continuing economic pressures on ordinary Iraqis, but also about future cyclical downturns.

28. See for example, American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1999 (Chicago: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 1999), p.30.

29. See Huntington, The Third Wave, and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

30. A renowned phrase from the 1994 Budapest document of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

31. See, for example, President George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, in Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp.128–9, President Bill Clinton, speech in Detroit, Michigan, 22 October 1996, and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, speech at The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, 23 October 1997.

32. One early, critical analysis of US programmes was Assessment of Selected USAID Projects in Russia (Washington, DC: US General Accounting Office, August 1995), GAO/NSIAD-95-156.

33. U.S. Assistance and Related Programmes for the Newly Independent States of the Former Soviet Union: Annual Report 2000 (Washington, DC: US Department of State, January 2001), p. 79, and Annual Report 1999, p. 70.

34. The two-thirds of Russians who in 1999 responded affirmatively to whether, despite democracy's problems, it ‘is better than any other form of rule’, up from 57 per cent in 1995, in Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy, p.50.

35. These benchmarks include: establishing the Iraqi Governing Council (July 2003), Transitional Administrative Law (March 2004), formal transfer of authority to Interim Iraqi Government (June 2004), elections for Iraqi Transitional Government (January 2005), referendum on new Iraqi constitution (October 2005), elections for first permanent government (December 2005), parliament convenes for the first time (March 2006).

36. From the State of the Union, January 2004: ‘America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins. The killers will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom’. January 2005: ‘Our commitment remains firm and unchanging. We are standing for the freedom of our Iraqi friends.’ January 2006: ‘Our enemies and our friends can be certain: The United States will not retreat from the world, and we will never surrender to evil. … We are in this fight to win, and we are winning.’

37. David Rothkopf, ‘Look Who's Running the World Now’, Washington Post, 12 March 2006, p. B01.

38. ‘Rebuilding Security Forces and Institutions in Iraq’, RAND National Defense Research Institute (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp., 2005).

39. From 1987 to 1997, Western European military expenditures declined (in constant 1997 US dollars) 15 per cent with a 22 per cent decline in the number of troops, and from 8.3 to 5.5 per cent of central government spending. US spending declined 26 per cent with a one-third decrease in number of troops (from 2.2 million to 1.5 million), and from 27 per cent to 16 per cent of federal spending. Russian troop levels also fell by one-third between 1992 and 1997, but its per capita GDP declined sharply even before the 1998 crash. World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1998 (Washington, DC: US Department of State, Bureau of Verification and Compliance, April 2000), esp. pp.65, 100, 109.

40. US Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, ‘Country Profile: Russia’, August 2005.

41. Pollingreport.com offers polling data for 2003 through 2006 from CNN/USAToday/ Gallup, Newsweek, CBS, AP and others, <www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm>.

42. Scott Wallsten, ‘The Economic Cost of the Iraq War’, The Economists' Voice, Vol.3, No.2 (January 2006), of $1 trillion, and Joseph Stiglitz, ‘The High Cost of The Iraq War’, The Economists' Voice, Vol.3, No.3 (March 2006), of $2 trillion, both at <www.bepress.com/ev>.

43. Russia's Road to Corruption (Washington, DC: US House of Representatives, September 2000).

44. Claudia Rossett, ‘Gore's photo-op commission’, Wall Street Journal, 28 September 2000, <www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/cRosett/?id=65000330>.

45. Jack Matlock, on Voice of America, 2 December 1999, <www.fas.org/news/russia/1999/991202-rus-1.htm>.

46. See, for example, J. Anderson and B. Sebti, ‘Car blasts kill dozens in Baghdad; leaders agree to expedite unity talks’, Washington Post, 13 March 2006, p. A10.

47. Sunni Arabs largely boycotted the January 2005 elections, but had voter turnout of over 50 per cent in December. ‘US encouraged by efforts for fairness in Iraqi elections’, US Department of State, 4 January 2006, <http://usinfo.state.gov/mena/Archive/2006/Jan/04-110464.html>.

48. On the oligarchs, see Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York: Crown, 2000). On aid, see Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (New York: St. Martin's, 1998). On George H.W. Bush, see Aslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy, p. 220, and Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory, p.152. On Clinton–Gore see, for example, Condoleezza Rice, on Voice of America, 2 December 1999, <www.fas.org/news/russia/1999/991202-rus-6.htm>, and the extensive Russia's Road to Corruption. On the failure of all ‘experts’, see Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2000).

49. See, for example, E. Wayne Merry on Voice of America, 2 December 1999, <www.fas.org/news/russia/991202-rus1.htm>; Martin E. Malia, ‘The Haunting Presence of Marxism-Leninism’ and Alexander Lukin, ‘Forcing the Pace of Democratization,’ both in Journal of Democracy, Vol.10, No.2 (April 1999).

50. James Fallows offered before-and-after looks at planning, ‘The Fifty-First State?’ Atlantic Monthly (November 2002) and ‘Blind into Baghdad’, Atlantic Monthly (January–February 2004). On the Future of Iraq Project, see David Phillips, Losing Iraq: Inside the Post-war Reconstruction Fiasco (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2005). Accounts from democratization advisors include Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2005) and Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and Ethics of Nation-Building (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). In contrast, see the top American envoy's own account of his battles in Washington and Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, My Year in Iraq (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). A thorough criticism of the planning and execution of the occupation is George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, who previously collaborated on The Generals' War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995) on the Persian Gulf War, detail the military and political decision-making in Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006).

51. Nation-building elites bring their own experience and ideological commitments, as Jeffrey Sachs did to Russia with lessons from Polish and Bolivian shock therapy, and as Rumsfeld did with ‘military transformation’ ideas based on smaller, post-Cold War military threats and tasks. See Eric Shinseki, testimony to the US Senate Armed Services Committee, 25 February 2003, and Anthony Zinni, speech at the Center for Defense Information, 12 May 2004.

52. Freedom House began to note a decline in its 1998–1999 report, and in its 2005 report demoted Russia from ‘partly-free’ to ‘not free’. Current and historic editions of Freedom in the World: The Annual Report of Political Rights and Civil Liberties are available at <www.freedomhouse.org>.

53. George W. Bush, nationally televised address and press conference, 13 April 2004.

54. Kenneth Pollack, A Switch in Time: A New Strategy for America in Iraq (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2006), p.19.

55. Robert D. Kaplan, ‘Who Lost Russia?’, New York Times, 8 October 2000.

56. Wolfe, Americans as Proconsuls, p.445.

57. Major General Peter W. Chiarelli, US Army, and Major Patrick R. Michaelis, US Army, ‘Winning the Peace: The Requirement for Full-Spectrum Operations’, Military Review (July-August 2005). Col. Garland Williams, US Army, similarly values the role of engineering corps as peacekeepers, Engineering Peace: The Military Role in Postconflict Reconstruction (Washington, DC: US Institute for Peace, 2005).

58. See, for example, M. Ware, ‘Talking with the enemy’, Time, 28 February 2005; M. Fam, ‘US embassy in Iraq refuses to negotiate’, 1 July 2005, Associated Press; CNN interview of Zalmay Khalilzad, 11 December 2005.

59. UNDG Iraq Trust Fund, February 2006 Newsletter, <www.irffi.org>; US Department of State, ‘Advancing the President's National Strategy for Victory in Iraq’, pub. No.11323, Feb. 2006.

60. M. Albright, ‘Good vs evil does not work as foreign policy’, Financial Times, 24 March 2006; J. Dobbins, ‘Bush needs allies near Iraq, no matter how unsavory’, Financial Times, 1 November 2005. The author does not necessarily concur.

61. See, for example, Michael Ledeen, testimony to the US House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations, 8 March 2006.

62. Publilius Syrus, Maxims, Maxim 864, in John Bartlett and Nathan Dole, Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1919), reprinted at www.bartleby.com/100/707.html.