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Success Requires Patience by Niall Ferguson 
Success Requires Patience By Niall Ferguson Monday, May 3, 2004; Page A21 "Our patience is not eternal," declared Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief spokesman for the U.S. military command in Baghdad recently. Well, yes. Unfortunately, lack of patience has been one of the major flaws of the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein last year. This impatience is nothing new. It has been a recurrent feature in the history of American overseas intervention. In the 106 years since the American age of empire formally began -- with the war against Spain in 1898 -- the United States has intervened militarily in many places, from Lebanon to Liberia, from Cuba to Cambodia. In only a few can it be said to have attempted both regime change and the institutional transformation we now call "nation-building." In some cases, the United States has stayed for a very long time indeed. It annexed Hawaii and turned Guam and American Samoa into permanent possessions. The Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands were added during the two world wars on much the same basis. In the two best-known success stories -- Japan and West Germany after World War II -- the United States wound up its formal occupation after, respectively, 7 and 10 years but has retained a military presence to the present. No one can argue with President Bush's claim that these examples (to which South Korea might legitimately be added) prove that when the United States sets its mind to transforming a country for the better, it can work. But when the U.S. presence has not been sustained, the results have been mixed. Consider the Dominican Republic, which the United States occupied and ran from 1916 to 1924, or Haiti, which got the same treatment between 1915 and 1934. Consider South Vietnam, which the United States propped up with a substantial military presence for a mere seven years. There are no perfect correlations in history. But there is a suggestive relationship between the duration of American military presence and the success with which occupied countries have achieved economic growth and the transition to enduring democratic institutions. For this reason, there have been grounds for uneasiness about the Bush administration's proposed timetable for Iraq's transformation. That timetable was always going to be tight. Bush made this clear in a pre-war speech to the American Enterprise Institute. "We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary," he declared, "and not a day more." On Sept. 26, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council would be given just six months to draw up a new constitution for the country; after that, elections would be held and power handed to the winners. But by November, with no agreement in sight on the form of elections or the new constitution, this timetable was junked. At the suggestion of the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, a definitive deadline was set: Power would be restored to an Iraqi government -- any Iraqi government -- on June 30. This was meant to kill two political birds with one stone. It would reassure disgruntled Iraqi leaders that there was no need to take up arms against the soon-to-depart CPA. And it would reassure American voters that the president had a clear pre-election "exit strategy." It is perhaps inherent in the nature of a democracy that it should operate with a short time-horizon. There is strong evidence from previous conflicts -- notably Korea and Vietnam -- of a negative correlation between the level of American casualties and the popularity of an executive at war. Indeed, the sensitivity of the American electorate to casualties seems to have grown more acute since the Cold War. Over the past year, the percentage of Americans happy with the way things are going in Iraq has slumped from 85 percent to 35 percent, though fewer than 600 U.S. service personnel have been killed by hostile action since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Small wonder U.S. political actors have a tendency to start looking for an exit some time before the drama has been concluded. Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw to the project of high-speed nation-building: the extreme difficulty of securing local support once a pledge to depart soon has been announced. Why should an Iraqi today risk collaborating with a fly-by-night occupier such as Bremer? How sure can Iraqis be that Bush means it when he insists that after June 30 "our reconstruction assistance will continue and our military commitment will continue"? The time frame is the key to successful nation-building. It's no coincidence that the countries where U.S. military intervention has been most successful have been those in which the United States maintained a prolonged military presence. In an important but under-reported speech in June 2003, the former leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, Paddy Ashdown, reflected on the "principles of peace-making" he had learned in his capacity as the international community's high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His seventh point was: "[To] avoid setting deadlines, and settle in for the long haul. . . . Installing the software of a free and open society is a slow business. It cannot be done . . . in a year or so. . . . Peace-keeping needs to be measured not in months but decades. What we need here . . . is 'stick-to-it-iveness' . . . the political will, the unity of purpose, and the sheer stamina . . . to see the job through to lasting success. That means staying on, and sticking at it, long after the CNN effect has passed." That is just one of many lessons from British experience, past and present, that the Bush administration has failed to heed. The British occupied Iraq in 1917, became trustees of a League of Nations mandate in 1920, quelled a rebellion that same year, installed a pro-British monarch in 1921, handed over sovereignty to him in 1922 -- and retained troops in the country until 1955. In recent testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Marc Grossman, undersecretary of state for political affairs, gave a hint that this approach may yet be forced on the United States. "Limited sovereignty" was the telltale phrase he let slip -- precisely the status of Iraq between 1922 and 1955. Limiting Iraq's sovereignty for 33 years may seem a fantastic idea today. Yet the Federal Republic of Germany's sovereignty was not fully restored until 1991. America's patience should not be eternal when it comes to unilateral cease-fires with insurgents. But patience is precisely what the United States needs if it is to achieve long-term success in Iraq. Niall Ferguson's latest book is "Colossus: The Price of America's Empire." He is Herzog professor of history at New York University's Stern School of Business and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. © 2004 The Washington Post Company |