LF: Nation-Building Is Not Conservative

Title: Nation-Building Is Not Conservative
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Published: Dec 31, 2011
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Post Date: 2011-12-31 12:25:44 by We The People
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Views: 3494
Comments: 9

Nation-Building Is Not Conservative

by Rep. Ron Paul

A recent study [.pdf] by the Pentagon's Defense Science Task Force on Strategic Communications concluded that in the struggle for hearts and minds in Iraq, "American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended." This Pentagon report flatly states that our war in Iraq actually has elevated support for radical Islamists. It goes on to conclude that our active intervention in the Middle East as a whole has greatly diminished our reputation in the region, and strengthened support for radical groups. This is similar to what the CIA predicted in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, before the invasion took place.
Then, earlier this month we learned that the CIA station chief in Baghdad sent a cable back to the U.S. warning that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating, and not expected to improve any time soon. Other CIA experts also warn that the security situation in Iraq is likely to get even worse in the future. These reports are utterly ignored by the administration.
These recent reports are not the product of some radical antiwar organization. They represent the U.S. government's own assessment of our "progress" in Iraq after two and a half years and the loss of thousands of lives. We are alienating the Islamic world in our oxymoronic quest to impose democracy in Iraq.
This demonstrates once again the folly of nation-building, which is something candidate Bush wisely rejected before the 2000 election. The worsening situation in Iraq also reminds us that going to war without a congressional declaration, as the Constitution requires, leads us into protracted quagmires over and over again.
The reality is that current-day Iraq contains three distinct groups of people who have been at odds with each other for generations. Pundits and politicians tell us that a civil war will erupt if the U.S. military departs. Yet our insistence that Iraq remain one indivisible nation actually creates the conditions for civil war. Instead of an artificial, forced, nationalist unity between the Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds, we should allow each group to seek self-government and choose voluntarily whether they wish to associate with a central government. We cannot impose democracy in Iraq any more than we can erase hundreds of years of Iraqi history.
Even opponents of the war now argue that we must occupy Iraq indefinitely until a democratic government takes hold, no matter what the costs. No attempt is made by either side to explain exactly why it is the duty of American soldiers to die for the benefit of Iraq or any other foreign country. No reason is given why American taxpayers must pay billions of dollars to build infrastructure in Iraq. We are expected to accept the interventionist approach without question, as though no other options exist. This blanket acceptance of foreign meddling and foreign aid may be the current Republican policy, but it is not a conservative policy by any means.

Non-interventionism was the foreign policy ideal of the Founding Fathers, an ideal that is ignored by both political parties today. Those who support political and military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere should have the integrity to admit that their views conflict with the principles of our nation's founding. It's easy to repeat the tired cliché that "times have changed since the Constitution was written" – in fact, that's an argument the left has used for decades to justify an unconstitutional welfare state. Yet if we accept this argument, what other principles from the founding era should we discard? Should we reject federalism? Habeas corpus? How about the Second Amendment? The principle of limited government enshrined in the Constitution – limited government in both domestic and foreign affairs – has not changed over time. What has changed is our willingness to ignore that principle.

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Deconstructing Nation Building

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/article/2005/oct/24/00013/

When plunging into war, hope generally triumphs over experience. The past—the quiet statistical tabulation of what happened when this was tried before—tends to be ignored in the heat of angry oratory and the thump of military boots. At the outset, it is easy to believe that force will be successful in upholding virtue and that history has no relevance.

Lately, this confidence in the force of arms has centered on nation building, that is, the idea of invading and occupying a land afflicted by dictatorship or civil war and turning it into a democracy. Alas, in their enthusiasm for nation building by force of arms, neither the theorists nor the practitioners have seriously looked at the historical experience with this kind of policy. If, after the troops leave, another dictatorship or another civil war ensues, then one has ploughed the sea. One has suffered the costs of the invasion—Americans killed, local inhabitants killed, destruction of property, tax money squandered, loss of international support, and so on—to no lasting purpose.

To see how nation building in general works out, I have compiled a list of all the cases since 1850 in which the United States and Great Britain employed military forces in a foreign land to cultivate democracy. I included only those cases where ground troops were deployed and clearly intervened in local politics. I have left aside the cases involving lesser types of involvement such as sending aid or military advisors or limited peacekeeping efforts or simply having military bases in the country.

In order to constitute a complete case of attempted nation building, troops have to have left the country (or be uninvolved politically if based in the country) so that we may see whether, in the absence of military support, a stable democracy continued to exist. For this reason we cannot use ongoing involvements such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghan-istan, and Iraq. The application of this definition identifies 51 instances of attempted nation building by Britain and the United States. The question is, how often did they succeed?

The meaning of success involves more than holding an election and setting up a government. Nation building implies building, that is, constructing a lasting edifice. The nation builders concur in this notion of durability. Their idea isn’t just to hold elections, get out, and have the country revert to anarchy or dictatorship. As President Bush has said, the aim in Iraq is to create lasting institutions of freedom. To call a nation building effort a success, therefore, we need to see that the military occupation of the target country was followed by the establishment of an enduring democracy.

To identify results in these terms, I inspected the political history of each country after the troop withdrawal. I looked for events betokening the collapse of democratic rule, including the suppression of opposition leaders or parties, major infringements of freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, violent transfers of power, murder of political leaders by other leaders, and significant civil war. I required large and multiple failures along these lines as evidence of democratic failure. A few arrests of opposition leaders were not be enough to disqualify the country as a democracy nor a few assassinations of ambiguous meaning nor a simple military coup nor the resignation of an executive in the face of massive street demonstrations. If numerous free and fair elections were held, this was taken as strong evidence that democracy survived. Elections that were one-sided and to some degree rigged by the incumbents were taken as a negative sign, but they did not, in themselves, disqualify the country as democratic.

The results of applying these principles to the political outcomes in the 51 cases of intervention are shown in the following table. Overall, the results indicate that military intervention succeeded in leaving behind democracies in 14 cases—27 percent of the time. The conclusion, then, is that nation building by force is generally unsuccessful. A president who went around the world invading countries to make them democratic would fail most of the time. One group of countries that seem especially resistant to democracy-building efforts are the Arab lands. There have been are nine interventions in Arab countries in the past century. In no case did stable democracy follow the military occupation.

In assessing the effectiveness of nation-building efforts, we should be careful not to confuse conjunction with cause. Just because some military interventions have been followed by democracy, this does not mean that the interventions caused the democracy. There is a worldwide movement against the use of force, and this trend promotes democratic development. Rulers are becoming less disposed to use violence to repress oppositions, and oppositions are less inclined to use force against incumbents. As a result, countries are becoming democracies on their own, without any outside help.

For example, we might be tempted to praise the British occupation of Malaysia as bringing democracy. But in the same period, the neighboring Asian country of Thailand, not occupied, also joined the camp of democratic nations. In fact, in Freedom House’s survey of political rights and civil liberties, Thailand ranks ahead of Malaysia. It is quite possible, then, that Malaysia would have become a democracy without British intervention.

South Korea presents an interesting lesson in the effectiveness of nation building. Beginning in 1945, when U.S. troops landed, the United States was heavily involved in guiding political decisions in South Korea. This political involvement essentially ceased after 1961, and the South Koreans were allowed to go their own way politically. This way proved to be a military dictatorship under General Park Chung-Hee, which lasted until his murder in 1979. Thereupon followed two coups, a violent uprising in Kwangju, and many bloody street demonstrations. By 1985, however, the suppression of civil liberties had been greatly relaxed and competitive elections were held. Since that time, South Korea can be called a democracy (albeit a noisy one with plenty of corruption). So here is a case where 16 years of American tutelage brought failure in terms of democratic nation building, while the country evolved to democracy on its own 25 years after American involvement in local politics ceased.

Nations around the world are gradually becoming democratic on their own. Therefore, the 14 cases of nation-building “success” cannot be attributed to military intervention. These countries might well have become democracies without it.

The nation-building idea has a critical, generally overlooked, gap: who knows how to do it? Pundits and presidents talk about nation building as if it were a settled technology, like building bridges or removing gall bladders. Huge amounts of government and foundation money have been poured into the topic of democracy building, and academics and bureaucrats have produced reams of verbose commentary. But still there is no concrete, useable body of knowledge.

And, being a non-specialty, there cannot be any experts in it. The people who end up doing the so-called nation building are simply ordinary government employees who happen to wind up at the scene of the military occupation. Many times they are military officers with no background in politics, sociology, or social psychology—not that it would help them. For the most part, these government employees see their mission as getting themselves and the U.S. out of the country without too much egg on their faces. They have no clearer idea of how to “instill democratic culture” than the readers of this page.

A look at some specific examples of nation building illustrates the intellectual vacuum. The 1989 U. S. invasion of Panama is credited in our tabulation as a nation-building success. Was this positive outcome the result of the expert application of political science? One of the nation builders, Lt. Col. John T. Fishel, has written a book on the Panama experience that gives quite a different picture. Fishel was Chief of Policy and Strategy for U. S. forces in Panama, and it was his job to figure out how to implement the mission statement. The orders looked simple on paper: “Conduct nation building operations to ensure democracy.” But Fishel quickly discovered that the instruction was meaningless because democracy was an “undefined goal.” It seemed to him that it wasn’t the job of military officers to figure out how to implement this undefined objective, but, as he observes with a touch of irritation, “there are no U. S. civilian strategists clearly articulating strategies to achieve democracy.”

The fact that there was no clear definition of the conditions that constitute democracy meant that the Military Support Group and the other U.S. government agencies that were attempting to assist the Endara government had only the vaguest concept of what actions and programs would lead the country toward democracy ...

In practice, what the goal of “ensuring democracy” boiled down to was installing Guillermo Endara, the winner of a previous election, as president, supporting him as he became increasingly high-handed and unpopular, and then stepping away after his opponent was elected in 1994. Not exactly rocket science.

Were the military planners trying to tell us something when they gave the Panama nation-building exercise the code name Blind Logic?

Austria presents an instructive example of what nation building has actually amounted to on the ground. In our tabulation, Austria is classified as a case of successful nation building, but a close look reveals that the U.S. role was irrelevant, if not harmful.

After the war, Austria was jointly occupied by Russia as well as the Western powers. The Soviets brought Karl Renner, the elderly and respected Austrian Socialist leader, to Vienna to be the head of a provisional government. Renner’s provisional government declared the establishment of the Democratic Austrian Republic on April 27, 1945. For six months, the United States refused to recognize this government (fearing that the Russians were up to no good in supporting it). Finally, when it could not be denied that the provisional government was popular and functioning, the United States recognized it.

Austria thus presents a doubly ironic lesson in how nation building unfolds. The United States—the democratic power—stood in the way of local leaders who were attempting to establish a democratic regime, and the Soviet Union—the world’s leading dictatorship—unintentionally acted as midwife for the first democratic administration. Obviously, in Austria, no democracy needed to be “built.” The democratic forces in Austria were strong enough to establish a democracy on their own, and they did it in spite of the “nation builders.”

The advocates of nation building need to go back and take a close look at what really happened in the postwar political evolution of the defeated powers. In the lore of nation building, it is supposed that American experts applied sophisticated social engineering that forced these countries to become democracies against their will. It wasn’t that way at all. These countries became democracies on their own, and the bumptious generals and paper-shuffling bureaucrats of the military occupation were generally more of a hindrance than a help.

The recent intervention in Iraq further illustrates how haphazard and unfocused nation building is in practice. While the military campaign was a success, the occupation and administration has been characterized by naïveté and improvisation. The U.S. had no policy to check looting after victory, nor the forces to do it, and the result was a ravaging of local infrastructure, the rapid formation of gangs of thugs and paramilitary fighters, and a loss of local support for the U.S. effort. The civilian administration was first put in the hands of retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who was two weeks late getting to Baghdad, and who naively expected to find a functioning government in the country. After a month, the hapless Garner was fired, replaced by Paul Bremer as chief administrator. Two months after the invasion, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the V Corps commander, described the nation-building “technique” U.S. officials were applying in Iraq: “We’re making this up here as we go along.”

Nation building by military force is not a coherent, defensible policy. It is based on no theory, it has no proven technique or methodology, and there are no experts who know how to do it. The record shows that it usually fails, and even when it appears to succeed, the positive result owes more to historical evolution and local political culture than anything nation builders might have done.

We The People posted on 2011-12-31 12:32:09 ET Reply Untrace Trace Private Reply

#2. To: We The People (#1)

Vote Ron Paul!

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So Now We’re Nation Building in Libya?

March 22, 2011

By Lonely Conservative Comments are off for this post

President Obama said something today about bombing Libya due to a mandate from the UN Security Council.

“Our military action is in support of an international mandate from the Security Council that specifically focuses on the humanitarian threat posed by Colonel Gadhafi’s people,” Obama said at a news conference here.

Removing Gaddafi isn’t part of that “mandate,” but he says there are other “tools” that can be used to oust Gaddafi. (And since when does the US military take orders from the UN?) What he didn’t say is that we’re nation building. But that’s the message he delivered to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a phone call last night.

The White House suggested Tuesday the mission in Libya is one of regime change, despite emphatic statements from President Obama and military brass that the goal is not to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power.
According to a White House readout of a Monday night call between Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the two leaders “underscored their shared commitment to the goal of helping provide the Libyan people an opportunity to transform their country, by installing a democratic system that respects the people’s will.”
The term “installing” suggests the goal of regime change.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for clarification.

Are we nation building or aren’t we? Are we really going to wind down US operations, as we were told earlier, or are we going to install a democratic system? If so, how are we going to do so without boots on the ground?

In related news, France is proposing a “political steering committee” outside of NATO to oversee operations in Libya. Maybe that’s because NATO allies are already squabbling over who’s in charge and what to do next.

A war of words has erupted between the U.S. and Britain after the U.K. government claimed Muammar Gaddafi is a legitimate target for assassination.
U.K. government officials said killing the Libyan leader would be legal if it prevented civilian deaths as laid out in a U.N. resolution.
But U.S. defence secretary Robert Gates hit back at the suggestion, saying it would be ‘unwise’ to target the Libyan leader and that the bombing campaign should stick to the ‘U.N. mandate’.
The infighting comes as a heated meeting of NATO ambassadors yesterday failed to resolve whether the 28-nation alliance should run the operation to enforce a U.N.-mandated no-fly zone, diplomats said.

Wait, did I read that right? Did Robert Gates say we’re sticking to the UN mandate and not targeting Gaddafi? How can we install a democratic system if we don’t target Gaddafi?

Are you confused yet? I know I am.

Hot Air has more.

Oh, and wait till you see what this is costing us.

Also worth a read is Ben Stein’s latest piece: “One World Government Obama”

But, when did we amend the Constitution to declare that the United Nations had control over our military? When did we abolish the part of the Constitution that said Congress had the right to declare war? Now, I well know that in recent postwar conflicts, we don’t have declarations of war. But we have Congressional debates. We have funding votes. We have a sense of the Congress or some kind of resolution.
This time, zip. Nada. Nothing. Just France and the U.K. and Norway saying that it’s time to go to war, and off America goes to war. And off Mr. and Mrs. Obama go to a South American “fact finding” trip for the POTUS and a fun sightseeing junket for the Obama girls.
(I wonder if there has ever before in history been a national leader who sent his country to war — and the same day went off on vacation. Has that ever happened before? )

Not that I can recall. Read the whole thing.

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