This is from Carnegie Endowment For International Peace and the link is found in Le Monde Diplomatique:
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cahier/irak/a10058
Lessons from the Past:
The American Record in Nation-Building
By Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper
The following is an unedited version of a forthcoming policy brief. The final document will be published May 1, 2003 in both electronic and print form.
Executive Summary
The record shows that democratic nation-building is among the most ambitious and difficult of foreign policy undertakings for the United States. Of the 16 over the past century, democracy was sustained in only 4 countries ten years after the departure of American forces. Two of these followed total defeat and surrender (in World War II) and two were in tiny countries (Grenada and Panama). The record also reveals that unilateral nation-building by the United States has an even lower success rate perhaps because unilateralism has led to the creation of surrogate regimes and direct American administration during the interim post-conflict period. The use of interim surrogate regimes has produced a record of complete failure. No American-supported surrogate regime made the transition to democracy and only one case of direct American administration (in Japan) succeeded in ushering in democracy. To heed the lessons of experience, the Bush administration should support a multilateral reconstruction strategy centered on bolstering political legitimacy and economic burden-sharing under the auspices of the United Nations.
The real test for the success of President George W. Bush's preemptive strike against the regime of Saddam Hussein is whether or not he can rebuild Iraq after the war. Few national undertakings are as complex, costly, and time-consuming as reconstructing the governing institutions of foreign societies. Even the combination of unsurpassed military power and abundant wealth does not guarantee success, let alone quick results. Historically, nation-building attempts by outside powers are notable mainly for their bitter disappointments, not their triumphs.
Among great powers, the United States is perhaps the most active nation-builder. Since the founding of the republic, the United States has used its armed forces abroad on more than 200 occasions. To be sure, the majority of American military interventions abroad consisted of major wars (as in the two world wars), peace-keeping missions (as in Bosnia today), proxy wars (as in Nicaragua and Angola in the 1980s), covert operations (such as the coup in Chile in 1973), humanitarian interventions (as in the Balkans in the 1990s), rescue of American citizens, defense of allies under attack (as in Korea in 1950), and one-off retaliatory strikes (as the bombing raid against Libya in 1986). To separate ordinary military interventions from nation-building efforts, we apply three strict criteria. First, the practical effect, if not the declared goal, of American intervention must be a regime change or the survival of a regime which would otherwise collapse. Regime change or survivability is the core objective of nation-building because an outside power, such as the United States, must overthrow a hostile regime and/or maintain a friendly indigenous regime to implement its plans. Without such indigenous regimes, nation-building by outside powers is merely colonial rule by another name. It is worth noting that, at the outset, the primary goal of the United States was, in most cases, strategic. Washington decided to replace or support a regime in a foreign land to defend its core security and economic interests, not to build democracy. Later, America's own political ideals and the need to sustain domestic support for nation-building made it imperative that the United States establish democratic rule in target nations.
The deployment of large numbers of American ground troops is the second indispensable element of nation-building. As the case of Guatemala in 1954 demonstrates, regime-change may occasionally be accomplished without the deployment of American ground forces. But nation-building generally requires the lengthy commitment of ground forces which are used to depose the regime targeted by the United States or maintain a regime the United States it favors. In many cases, American ground troops are needed not only to fight hostile forces in target countries, but to perform essential administrative functions, such as establishing law and order.
Finally, the use of American military and civilian personnel in the political administration of the target countries is the quintessential feature of nation-building. As a result of deep American involvement in the political process of target countries, the United States exercises decisive influence in the selection of political leaders to head the new regimes. Washington also restructures the key political institutions of the target countries (such as rewriting the constitution and other important laws) and participates in the routine administrative activities (such as public finance and delivery of social services) of target countries.
Based on these criteria, we characterize 16 of more than 200 American military interventions since 1900, roughly 8 percent, as attempts at nation-building through the promotion or imposition of democratic institutions desired by American policy-makers. (Table 1).
The rest of the document :
http://www.ceip.org/files/Publicatio...p?from=pubdate
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