A Formula for Iraq

“Nation-Building: The Inescapable Responsibility of the World’s Only Superpower” by James Dobbins, in RAND Review (Summer 2003), 1700 Main St., P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, Calif. 90407–2138. Longer version available at www.rand.org.

The examples of Germany and Japan after World War II are often cited to show what could be accomplished in reconstructing Iraq. But the United States has had much more recent and varied experience in democratic “nation-building”—in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. The fuller record, says Dobbins, who served as a U.S. special envoy in all five places and is now director of RAND’s International Security and Defense Policy Center, believes that democratic nation-building can work—but it takes huge investments of troops, money, and time.

The enduring “major transformations” in Germany and Japan have yet to be matched, but the nation-building effort that began in Kosovo in 1999 has been a “modest success,” and the one that began in Bosnia in 1995 has produced at least mixed results (democratic elections, but a weak constitutional government).

“From Somalia in 1992 to Kosovo in 1999, each nation-building effort was somewhat better managed than the previous one,” Dobbins says. The disastrous effort in Somalia was plagued by “an unnecessarily complicated U.S. and United Nations command structure,” while in Kosovo there was “unity of command” on both the military side (under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the civil side (under a UN representative). “Leader­­ship was shared effectively between Europe and the United States.”

What mainly separates the successes from the failures in Somalia, Haiti, and, to date, in Afghanistan, “is not the country’s levels of Western culture, democratic history, economic development, or ethnic homogeneity,” Dob­bins says. It’s “the level of effort that the United States and the international community have put into the democratic transformations.”

The number of troops deployed has ranged widely—from 1.6 million U.S. personnel in West Germany to 14,000 (U.S. and international) in Afghanistan. In Kosovo, there were 45,000 NATO troops, including 15,000 Americans. Providing the same level of troop commitment in Iraq, taking into account its much larger population, would require 526,000 U.S. and other troops through 2005, Dobbins says. [At last count, only 130,000 U.S. and 21,000 other troops (half of them British) were in Iraq.] Kosovo also had 4,600 international civil police officers; for the same protection per capita, Iraq would need 53,000. Foreign aid in Kosovo during the first two years of occupation amounted to $814 per inhabitant, and in Bosnia, $1,390. Those levels of aid in Iraq would add up to $20 billion and $36 billion, respectively, through 2005. [The Bush administration recently called for $21 billion in aid.]

To meet all of these needs, the United States will have to broaden international participation in the effort, conclude Dobbins and his RAND colleagues. Recent history suggests that nation-building is “the inescapable responsibility of the world’s only superpower,” they say, but even a superpower can’t do it alone.