Our Record on Nation Building Is Decidedly Mixed

Scott Peterson, in the Christian Science Monitor (July 15, 2004):

One of the most apt - and worrisome - warnings about the future of Iraq may be the successful CIA coup that once toppled the regime next door.

In Iran, the United States overthrew a prime minister and reinstalled Shah Reza Pahlavi, ushering in a quarter-century of dictatorship that itself was swept away by an anti-US Islamic revolution in 1979. Iran is one of several examples that today highlight the unpredictable risks of regime change and nation-building.

From the postwar occupations of Japan and Germany - which are cited by the Bush administration as models for Iraq - to the far less glowing recent examples in Somalia and Afghanistan, analysts say America has again failed to learn the lessons of its past. Nation-building is always hard - and almost never successful when done on the fly, on the cheap, or under fire, they say.

Despite ardent efforts by the US, Iraq is facing all three challenges. But with final results so uncertain the Iran case waves like a warning flag.

"It is not far-fetched to draw a line from [the Iran coup] through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York," says Stephen Kinzer in his book "All the Shah's Men."

First, some history: In 1953, fear of a communist takeover led the US to engineer the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. Historians today cite new documents that show those fears were exaggerated. The CIA coup had also been encouraged by British officials, seeking revenge against Mr. Mossadeq, for wresting control of Iran's oil industry from Britain two years earlier.

"The US went in thinking they were doing everybody a favor and thinking this was a clear way to protect American interests," says Malcolm Byrne, deputy director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

"In fact, within a generation all the fears [of an anti-American takeover] that motivated the move had come to pass," says Mr. Byrne, coeditor of a new volume about the coup based on newly declassified US documents. The 1979 Islamic revolution was "exactly what [US coupmakers] had tried to avoid."

While working to avoid such a stark reversal in Iraq's future, US officials don't look to Iran. They cite examples of postwar reconstruction in Germany and Japan in the 1940s. But to get it right half a century ago, US occupation authorities prepared diligently and kept control for years, historians say. They built upon political foundations that existed in prewar Germany and Japan; they committed far more troops and vast funds; and, perhaps most important, they faced no armed resistance.

Not one US soldier was killed in either occupation. By contrast in Iraq, since Baghdad fell to US troops on April 9, 2003, more than 620 uniformed Americans have died.

"The Germans recognized that they were defeated," says Charles Maier, a professor of German history at Harvard. "Even the hardcore Nazis understood that they were in no position to take on the occupying powers."

The time frame was also far more forgiving than in Iraq. The Western allies in Germany kept residual rights until 1955, even after handing political power to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

"We were far better prepared for the occupations of Germany and Japan," says Professor Maier. "We set up schools for civil administrators from 1942 on. Here [in Iraq] we've been drawing upon reservists who didn't expect this duty and were not trained for it." Dealing with an insurgency during occupation is not new, though the last time the US faced such a case was in the Philippines more than a century ago, from 1898 to 1902. "It was a bloody mess" trying to stamp out a pro-independence insurrection, says Maier. Nation building and democracy were not necessarily part of that colonial equation, and the Philippines weren't given self-rule for nearly 50 years....

"To really do nation-building right, it takes a national commitment, because it's going to take money, people, and time," says Conrad Crane, director of the US Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pa. Those conditions were met after World War II, because Americans feared a return of the kind of militarism in Germany and Japan that led to the war, as well as the spread of communism....

The Marshall Plan for Germany, by one estimate, amounted to 3 percent of US GNP for several years. "Today, it would be like our whole defense budget being applied to nation-building," says Crane. "It was a major expenditure, but everybody supported it."...

America's inconsistent record of nation-building - a mission that Mr. Bush rejected for US troops while campaigning in 2000 - may reflect a broader global disconnect.

"There's this liberal universalist assumption that afflicts the US when it intervenes, that by starkly demonstrating the virtues of American political standards, or market democracy, people from other cultures are going to appreciate them as much as we do," says [Jonathan] Stevenson [an analyst at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London]. "This is not the case."