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Despite failures in Iraq, nation-building on our plate

By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
Scripps Howard News Service
08-DEC-06

Incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declares one of his goals will be improving our military's performance in postwar environments. It's tempting to assume any pullback from Iraq signals the end of messy nation-building efforts, but recent history says otherwise, making Gates' commitment vitally important.

During the Cold War, America engaged in nation building once every decade, but since then it's been closer to once every couple of years, especially when you consider the inevitable splintering of fragile states. Iraq, for example, is logically considered three separate efforts: the good (Kurdish region), the bad (Shiite provinces) and the ugly (the Sunni triangle).

This higher frequency in what the Pentagon calls "post-conflict reconstruction and stability operations" corresponds to the sharp rise _ since Bush 41, mind you _ in the use of American forces in both crisis responses (e.g., civil strife, disaster relief) and regime-toppling exercises designed to round up bad guys (e.g., Panama's Noriega, Serbia's Milosevic & Co., Afghanistan's Taliban and al-Qaida, and Iraq's "deck of cards").

The problem is that bad guys get smarter, shifting their efforts from a "first half" (war) they cannot win against our world-class forces to a "second half" (postwar) where they can prevail against our rather mediocre nation-builders. Simply put, insurgents avoid our Leviathan force during war, waiting until the follow-on peace can be sabotaged by terrorism and the battered populace co-opted by their superior forms of tribe-building.

It's easy to call it a "clash of civilizations" and bail, but let me give you several reasons why that is utterly unrealistic.

First, failed states are the essential pawns in this "long war" against radical extremism. The global jihadist movement lives for such opportunities because, despite the "holy" warriors' vaunted reputation, they can't possibly achieve power anywhere but in the most debilitated regimes.

Second, globalization links our security to these failed states and this historic phenomenon is picking up speed. Too many Americans live under the delusion that globalization can be stopped with tariffs and a tall border fence, like it'll go away if we just decide we've had enough.

But guess what? Those three-billion-plus new capitalists recently added in the East and South want some version of our good life, and they're not simply abandoning the dream because Iraq turns out badly for us. China and India, for example, are all over Africa, linking their economies' booming resource needs to raw material providers.

Trust me, it'll always be somebody's blood for somebody's oil, or diamonds, or platinum, or ...

Third, rogue regimes love to meddle in failed states, as Lebanon's recent woes amply demonstrate. Syria has long used Lebanon as a platform for battling arch-nemesis Israel, and Iran just directed Hezbollah's splendid little war to draw global attention from its contested nuclear program.

Fourth, defaulting to local dictators as the answer (the preferred route for "realists") simply delays state failure without curing it. Sure, many strongmen, like Egypt's Hosni Mubarek, aim to replicate the "Chinese model" of economic reforms prior to political change, but most will fail in that quest simply because China itself blocks entry into globalization's low-cost tier.

Fifth, waiting on the United Nations to become that second-half peacekeeping kingpin is a dream that died more than a decade ago on the streets of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia that's now run _ by the way _ by a radical Islamist party. Yes, NATO can provide some modest help, but don't expect the "been there, done that" Europeans to resurrect a colonial-era "can do" spirit too far beyond their borders.

Sixth, the fundamental nature of war versus peace has been transformed: Wars have gotten shorter, easier to win, cheaper and less labor-intensive while the peace has grown dramatically longer, far more complex, a lot more expensive and inescapably labor-intensive.

Our real challenge today?

As our over-developed war-fighting force gets stronger, it drives up the resource requirements of our underdeveloped peacemaking force. We write checks with airpower that boots-on-the-ground cannot possibly cash.

The good news?

America's Army and Marines are changing this strategic mindset rapidly through improved training, doctrine and tactics. Now if only our incoming Secretary of Defense can shift the budget from smart weapons to smarter soldiers (something Donald Rumsfeld didn't manage), America will move far closer to fielding a second-half force that won't squander first-half leads like the one we've once held in Iraq.

(Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC.Contact him at tom(at)thomaspmbarnett.com.)

December 10, 2006

By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The outgoing secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, paid a surprise visit to Iraq this weekend and said American troops should stay in the country until the insurgents were defeated.

“We feel great urgency to protect the American people from another 9/11 or a 9/11 times two or three,” Mr. Rumsfeld said on Saturday, in remarks that were posted on the Defense Department’s Web site, in the Anbar province west of Baghdad.

“At the same time, we need to have the patience to see this task through to success,” he said. “The consequences of failure are unacceptable.”

Today was the second day of what American military officials said was Mr. Rumsfeld’s farewell visit to the troops. An American military spokesman said Mr. Rumsfeld was scheduled to travel to other bases outside Baghdad today before returning to Washington.

Last week, an independent panel that issued recommendations for changing strategy in Iraq, the Iraq Study Group, delivered a report amid mounting domestic anxiety about the war in Iraq, a month after midterm elections that brought the Democrats to power in Congress and prompted President Bush to dismiss Mr. Rumsfeld as defense secretary.

The commission warned that ”the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” and it handed President Bush a rebuke for his current strategy and a detailed blueprint for a fundamentally different approach, including the pullback of all American combat brigades over the next 15 months.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who visited the Balad and Al Asad air bases in Iraq, asserted that American forces believe in the campaign in Iraq, even if the domestic political debate rages on about changing strategy and withdrawing the troops.

The “men and women in uniform believe in what they are doing, they know it’s important, they know it’s worth the cost and in some cases the tears,” he said. “And they are convinced they can succeed and that our country can prevail. But only if we don’t lose our will.”

About a month ago Mr. Rumsfeld announced his resignation, cast out by the White House to signal a course correction in Iraq. His successor, Robert M. Gates, has already been overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate and is scheduled to be sworn in Dec. 18.

Mr. Rumsfeld has continued to counsel patience, saying in a farewell speech to employees at the Pentagon on Friday that to “pull out precipitously and inject that instability into the situation there” would be ”a terrible mistake.”

Mr. Rumsfeld has often come under criticism for his handling of the war and from senior military commanders.

The Iraq Study Group report called on the incoming defense secretary, Mr. Gates, to create ”an environment in which the senior military feel free to offer independent advice.”

Today, the Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, said the Study Group report offered dangerous recommendations that would undermine his country’s sovereignty and were "an insult to the people,” The Associated Press reported. Mr. Talabani said the report "is not fair, is not just, and it contains some very dangerous articles which undermine the sovereignty of and the constitution," The A.P. said.

James A. Baker III, a co-chair of the commission, said today on CNN that Mr. Talabani’s criticism was “disappointing” and the future of Iraq depends on whether the country can effect a national reconciliation program among Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

Despite failures in Iraq, nation-building on our plate

By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
Scripps Howard News Service
08-DEC-06

Incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declares one of his goals will be improving our military's performance in postwar environments. It's tempting to assume any pullback from Iraq signals the end of messy nation-building efforts, but recent history says otherwise, making Gates' commitment vitally important.

During the Cold War, America engaged in nation building once every decade, but since then it's been closer to once every couple of years, especially when you consider the inevitable splintering of fragile states. Iraq, for example, is logically considered three separate efforts: the good (Kurdish region), the bad (Shiite provinces) and the ugly (the Sunni triangle).

This higher frequency in what the Pentagon calls "post-conflict reconstruction and stability operations" corresponds to the sharp rise _ since Bush 41, mind you _ in the use of American forces in both crisis responses (e.g., civil strife, disaster relief) and regime-toppling exercises designed to round up bad guys (e.g., Panama's Noriega, Serbia's Milosevic & Co., Afghanistan's Taliban and al-Qaida, and Iraq's "deck of cards").

The problem is that bad guys get smarter, shifting their efforts from a "first half" (war) they cannot win against our world-class forces to a "second half" (postwar) where they can prevail against our rather mediocre nation-builders. Simply put, insurgents avoid our Leviathan force during war, waiting until the follow-on peace can be sabotaged by terrorism and the battered populace co-opted by their superior forms of tribe-building.

It's easy to call it a "clash of civilizations" and bail, but let me give you several reasons why that is utterly unrealistic.

First, failed states are the essential pawns in this "long war" against radical extremism. The global jihadist movement lives for such opportunities because, despite the "holy" warriors' vaunted reputation, they can't possibly achieve power anywhere but in the most debilitated regimes.

Second, globalization links our security to these failed states and this historic phenomenon is picking up speed. Too many Americans live under the delusion that globalization can be stopped with tariffs and a tall border fence, like it'll go away if we just decide we've had enough.

But guess what? Those three-billion-plus new capitalists recently added in the East and South want some version of our good life, and they're not simply abandoning the dream because Iraq turns out badly for us. China and India, for example, are all over Africa, linking their economies' booming resource needs to raw material providers.

Trust me, it'll always be somebody's blood for somebody's oil, or diamonds, or platinum, or ...

Third, rogue regimes love to meddle in failed states, as Lebanon's recent woes amply demonstrate. Syria has long used Lebanon as a platform for battling arch-nemesis Israel, and Iran just directed Hezbollah's splendid little war to draw global attention from its contested nuclear program.

Fourth, defaulting to local dictators as the answer (the preferred route for "realists") simply delays state failure without curing it. Sure, many strongmen, like Egypt's Hosni Mubarek, aim to replicate the "Chinese model" of economic reforms prior to political change, but most will fail in that quest simply because China itself blocks entry into globalization's low-cost tier.

Fifth, waiting on the United Nations to become that second-half peacekeeping kingpin is a dream that died more than a decade ago on the streets of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia that's now run _ by the way _ by a radical Islamist party. Yes, NATO can provide some modest help, but don't expect the "been there, done that" Europeans to resurrect a colonial-era "can do" spirit too far beyond their borders.

Sixth, the fundamental nature of war versus peace has been transformed: Wars have gotten shorter, easier to win, cheaper and less labor-intensive while the peace has grown dramatically longer, far more complex, a lot more expensive and inescapably labor-intensive.

Our real challenge today?

As our over-developed war-fighting force gets stronger, it drives up the resource requirements of our underdeveloped peacemaking force. We write checks with airpower that boots-on-the-ground cannot possibly cash.

The good news?

America's Army and Marines are changing this strategic mindset rapidly through improved training, doctrine and tactics. Now if only our incoming Secretary of Defense can shift the budget from smart weapons to smarter soldiers (something Donald Rumsfeld didn't manage), America will move far closer to fielding a second-half force that won't squander first-half leads like the one we've once held in Iraq.

(Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC.Contact him at tom(at)thomaspmbarnett.com.)

Op-Ed Columnist
After the Fall

By DAVID BROOKS
In fall 2007, the United States began to withdraw troops from Iraq, and so began the Second Thirty Years’ War. This war was a bewildering array of small and vast conflicts, which flared and receded and flared again across the entire Middle East, but which were joined by a common theme.

The essence of all this disorder was that the Arab nation-states lost control. Subnational groups — like Hezbollah and the Mahdi Army — and supranational groups — like loosely connected terror networks, the new Sunni and Shiite Leagues and the satellite television networks — went from strength to strength while central national governments toppled and fell. The collapse of national governments led to a power vacuum that the more authentic and deeply rooted social groups sought to fill.

This war had several stages. The first was the disintegration of Iraq. No national institutions could survive the onslaught: there was no impartial justice, no effective law enforcement, no political organization that put loyalty to nation above loyalty to sect or tribe. Absent a government of laws, government by death squads emerged. Militias — with their own hospitals, schools and indoctrination systems — sought to impose order through assassination and revenge.

The Muslim world watched the Sunni-Shiite bloodletting on satellite television and became enraged. Militias, seminaries and terror organizations developed transnational alliances. Shiite uprisings occurred in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Pakistan. Furious Sunnis rallied in places like Egypt, demanding that their leaders preserve Sunni supremacy.

The environment was ripe for new sorts of radical leaders, influenced by Moktada al-Sadr and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. These leaders were hot, charismatic and divisive. They had no intellectual ties to the old 20th-century Arab nationalism, which was scorned as the model that failed.

Chaos spread as governments in Lebanon and Jordan collapsed. The Palestinian Authority fell into complete dysfunction as Hamas and Fatah waged a low-boiling civil war. Al Qaeda reveled in the bloodshed and spread it with rapturous fury. The spreading disorder vindicated an observation that the historian Michael Oren had once made: that there are really only three nations in the Muslim Middle East: Iran, Turkey and Egypt. The other nations are make-believe. The borders are arbitrary and the governments are artificial.

The surviving governments scrambled to stay in front of their radicalized populations and meddled ceaselessly in the wars around them. Turkey meddled in Kurdistan. Iran meddled everywhere through Hezbollah and a legion of mini-Hezbollahs. The Saudis tried to buy their enemies off, but only ended up financing them. Egyptians spread out everywhere as foot soldiers and assassins, especially after the end of the Mubarak era.

Westerners had a great deal of trouble understanding the ever-shifting conflicts among sects they didn’t understand and tribes they’d never heard of. Early in the war, Americans engaged in a moronic debate about whether Iraq was in civil war, which illustrated that American vocabularies were trapped in the nation-state paradigm, and how unprepared Americans were to understand the non-nation-state world.

Parallels were made, some apt, some inapt, to the first Thirty Years’ War, which decimated Europe in the 17th century. That, too, was a spasmodic constellation of conflicts not among nation-states, but among faiths, tribes and local groupings.

This second version of that war produced a Middle East that looked medieval and postmodern at the same time. The core weakness of Middle Eastern nations was that over centuries Arab society had developed intricate social organizations based on family, tribe and faith. Loyalty to these superseded national bonds. Notions of federalism, subsidiarity and impersonal administration — the underpinnings of the nation-state — had trouble flourishing in these sands.

The Middle East’s weak national ties were ripped apart by the rising forces of the 21st century: religious fundamentalism, global terrorism, economic globalization and transnational communications networks. Efforts to do nation-building without security faced long odds. Efforts to exhort Iraqi and other leaders to behave “responsibly” — as defined by Western nationalist categories — were doomed to failure. The American defeat sealed the deal.

It was a terrible era for those brave patriots fighting for national unity. There was horrific turmoil, and the emergence of sociopolitical organizations whose likes the world had never seen.

December 8, 2006
Posthumous al-Zarqawi interview published
By OMAR SINAN
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - The leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, saw Iraq's Shiite Muslims as more dangerous than U.S. forces and more evil than deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in an interview published posthumously on the Internet on Friday.

The 33-page interview, carried out some time before a U.S. fighter bomber killed al-Zarqawi in a strike on his meeting place in June 7, could not be authenticated but it was posted on a website known to be a clearing-house for al-Qaida material.

The posting said it had been kept in al-Qaida's archive but did not explain why the terror group had decided to release it six months' after his death.

The text is ironic in that al-Zarqawi reveals his fury about the attacks of Iraq's Shiite militiamen on the country's Sunni Muslim community. Yet it was al-Zarqawi, a Sunni from Jordan, who fomented Shiite-Sunni strife as the best way to scuttle U.S. plans to rebuild Iraq after Saddam's overthrow.

Al-Zarqawi,, tells the interviewer - an al-Qaida publicity officer with the alias Abu al-Yaman al-Baghdadi - the leader of Iraq's Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is a "satan" who publicly tells Shiites to stay above the violence but secretly tells them to attack.

"Who are you lying to, you Iranian?" he says of al-Sistani, who was born in Iran.

"You are the one who has killed thousands of Sunnis with your edicts and orders."

"Al-Sistani has ordered his followers not to fight the Americans...and yet they hit Sunnis with assasinations, forcing them to flee their homes and attacking their mosques."

"For us, the Shiites are far more dangerous than the Americans," he said.

"The mass graves that Saddam perpetrated and all his other crimes over the past decades do not amount to one-tenth of what the Shiites have done in the last three years."

Al-Zarqawi also rails against the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and implicitly accuses him of being in league with Israel.

Nasrallah is a Shiite cleric and Hezbollah is a Shiite party.

Al-Zarqawi accuses Nasrallah of being two-faced in his opposition to Israel and suggests it is not an accident Israeli aircraft have not killed him as they have killed several leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

"Hassan Nasrallah sits for hours at a military parade and Israeli aircraft don't bomb him. Who is he kidding?" al-Zarqawi said.

Al-Zarqawi, whose real name was Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh, was responsible for a wave of attacks that occurred in the first years of the Iraqi insurgency.

He is believed to have personally beheaded at least two U.S. hostages. The United States put a US$25-million bounty on his head, the same amount as al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.