Posted on 06/25/2003 3:04:17 PM PDT by Pokey78
From Nazi Germany to Haiti, the lessons of regime change are clear
Iraq need not be a disaster. Its long-term future could be reasonably stable, secure and prosperous. The conditions for success are no secret. We have been here before several times. Iraq is not the first country to undergo regime change in the past few years. Some have been, and remain, appalling failures. Others have been at least partial successes.
The horrific murder of the six British military policemen on Tuesday, after the killing of many more American servicemen in recent weeks, does not mean certain failure. The security situation, while obviously precarious, can still be brought under control, provided the right strategy is followed.
But such a strategy is still only partly in place. The Bush Administration has moved a long way from its views when it took over in January 2001. The mantra then was no nation-building and no long-term peacekeeping role for American forces.
But successful regime change depends on planning, patience and perseverance. Countries that intervene militarily have to be prepared to stay the course. That often means several years, as is clear from a fascinating survey of eight cases by the Policy Exchange think-tank, entitled Regime Change, It’s Been Done Before. The essays cover Germany and Japan after 1945, Cambodia, South Africa, Haiti, East Timor, the Balkans and Afghanistan. South Africa is an exception since change was mainly internally generated.
The examples of Germany and Japan are seen “as sobering as they are encouraging since they show how large a commitment was required even in countries with relatively favourable preconditions for democratic transformation”. The two main failures, Haiti and Cambodia, reflect a lack of resolve and determination. In Haiti, the Clinton Administration failed to maintain pressure for reform in the face of domestic political pressures. In Cambodia, the United Nations mission had an inadequate mandate — and inadequate external support — that left intervening forces powerless in the face of murderous and corrupt political groups determined to resist regime change.
The most recent examples are between these extremes, involving both more vigorous military action than in Haiti and Cambodia and greater interest in creating new political institutions and in social and economic reconstruction. The Balkans, East Timor and Afghanistan have involved the presence of outside troops on a large scale for several years, as well as of outside civil administrators.
Prerequisites for success are internal security, respect for law and order, fair judicial procedures and an absence of corruption. These matter more than early elections, which can be rapidly undermined, as in Haiti, unless local institutions are built up. But such reforms are very hard to achieve.
The worry is that outside powers, particularly the US, lack the necessary long-term commitment. They look for rapid military solutions, while external willingness to provide money and forces quickly wears off, as shown by the gap between pledges and delivery. That has been the case in Afghanistan where the US aim was to drive out al-Qaeda and oust the Taleban rather than to reconstruct the country. So victory was won in the autumn of 2001 thanks to a combination of heavy bombing, infiltration by special forces and bribing of warlords. The result has been that the Karzai regime’s remit only really covers the Kabul area where the international security force operates. Elsewhere, the warlords are in control and Taleban forces have been active.
In Iraq, the military victory appears more complete than in Afghanistan. But the evaporation of many of Saddam’s most loyal troops in early April was deceptive since many have reappeared as guerrillas. Problems of disorder and breakdown of services were probably unavoidable and have been present in most previous cases. But their scale and duration could have been reduced if the US had made proper postwar preparations and had learnt from recent lessons in the Balkans. Some in the Pentagon took the naive view that coalition forces would be treated as liberators rather than occupiers and exile groups could form the basis of a new government. Both assumptions were wrong. The result has been big changes of personnel (the replacement of Jay Garner by Paul Bremer) and of plans (with the creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority, rather than an interim Iraqi government).
The Bremer team does at last seem to be moving in the right direction, though there is a very, very long way to go. Baghdad remains a mess, dangerous, with frequent power cuts and inadequate services. The coalition faces the familiar dilemma: can security be achieved without giving the Iraqis more control and involving Iraqi ministries and politicians more? In Germany and Japan, the occupying powers soon halted purges of the Nazis and the wartime bureaucracy because they had to find local administrators and faced new external security threats.
The underlying question — expressed both by liberal humanitarians such as Michael Ignatieff and Tory historians such as Niall Ferguson — is whether America is prepared to behave like an imperial power. The British have found such a role easier by habit and instinct. The Bush Administration has been moving in that direction, though it will need greater involvement by other countries, and the UN, to reassure the Iraqis.
The danger in Iraq is, as Ignatieff wrote about the Balkans and Afghanistan in his recent book Empire Lite, of a situation that “neither provides a stable long-term security guarantee, nor creates the conditions under which local leadership takes over”. The risk is a loss of authority and disillusionment. To succeed in Iraq, the US and Britain will have to accept a military and financial commitment lasting several years — as well as continuing casualties.
I don't like the tone of the title... gives the left too much to talk about.
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