IMO, this is a very good article about how the Americans should handle the current situation in Iraq. The article is kinda long, but worth reading…
WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 — James Dobbins has long been one of those troubleshooters who never seem to miss a crisis. As the special United States envoy for Afghanistan, Mr. Dobbins was responsible for finding and installing a successor to the Taliban after they were toppled in 2001. During the 1990’s, Mr. Dobbins hop-scotched from one trouble spot to another as he served as special envoy to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia. So when he offers a critique of the Bush administration’s nation-building effort in Iraq, it is worth paying attention. Now out of government, Mr. Dobbins, who has worked for Republican as well as Democratic administrations, does not have a partisan ax to grind. I spoke with Mr. Dobbins after reading “America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq,” which Mr. Dobbins co-wrote with other experts at the Rand Corporation, where he is now a senior official. L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator of Iraq, describes the recent book as a valuable “how to” manual on nation-building. Nevertheless, Mr. Dobbins believes that much of the Bush administration’s planning for the political and physical reconstruction of Iraq is an object lesson in how not to go about the nation-building task. Mr. Dobbins’s basic argument is this: The Bush administration would have been better prepared for its Iraq mission if it had heeded the lessons of the United States’ ongoing peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and other recent nation-building efforts. Those are cases, he argues, in which the United States had to contend with a security vacuum and the potential for ethnic strife, and designed a force to maintain order. But the Bush administration, he argues, has such disdain for anything associated with former President Bill Clinton that it largely ignored useful lessons from recent United States peacekeeping operations. To the extent it looked to history, the Mr. Bush’s administration turned to the American occupation of Germany and Japan more than half a century ago. It was, Mr. Dobbins says, a costly exercise in “political correctness”. “Iraq in 2003 looks more like Yugoslavia in 1996 than Germany and Japan in 1945,” Mr. Dobbins says. “What they have not done is look to the models worked out in the 1990’s for sharing the burden and allowing others to participate in the management of the enterprise”. Iraq poses its own unique challenges, but Mr. Dobbins argues that the nation-building problems there more closely resemble those faced in Bosnia and Kosovo than in Germany. Like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq is a multi-ethnic state that was held together by a dictator. Like Bosnia and Kosovo, it has a Muslim population. Unlike Germany, Iraq does not have an ethnically homogenous population or a first-world economy. Nor has it been devastated by total war. The failure to reflect on the sort of security breakdowns and power vacuums that the United States confronted in the former Yugoslavia, or Afghanistan and Haiti for that matter, Mr. Dobbins said, left the Bush administration less prepared for post-Hussein Iraq than it should have been. There is little historical support for the Defense Department’s initial claim that it would take fewer troops to occupy Iraq and stabilize the country than to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. In nation-building, Mr. Dobbins and his Rand colleagues have concluded that larger peacekeeping forces are better than smaller ones. Not only do small peacekeeping forces encourage potential adversaries to think they can challenge the peacekeepers but they also force the peacekeepers to rely more on firepower to make up for their limited numbers, raising the risk of civilian casualties and increased disaffection among the population. “The highest levels of casualties have occurred in the operations with the lowest levels of U.S. troops, suggesting an inverse ration between force levels and the level or risk,” the Rand book notes. In his book, Mr. Dobbins cites a rough strategic rule of thumb from the Balkans. It takes about 20 peacekeepers for each 1,000 civilians to safeguard the peace. Applying that rule to Iraq would yield a peacekeeping force of more than 450,000 in Iraq, a far cry from the 155,000 or so American and allied troops now trying to bring the “former regime loyalists,” foreign fighters, and anti-occupation Iraqis to heel. Those are the sorts of calculations that led the former Army chief of staff Eric K. Shinseki to tell Congress before the war that it could take several hundreds of thousands of troops to control Iraq. Such a force level, of course, would be hard for the United States to sustain alone for a long period, which is why Mr. Dobbins favors a multilateral approach. The United States had 50 percent of the world’s gross domestic product in 1945, Mr. Dobbins notes. Not only could it afford to finance the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, but there was no alternative. By the 1990’s, however, the share of G.D.P. was 22 percent. Sharing the burden for peacekeeping operations, he argues, was reasonable, politically desirable and an appropriate model for Iraq. The failure to anticipate the breakdown in order, to deploy sufficient forces at the outset and to take a more multinational approach has undermined the Bush administration’s broader political strategy in Iraq and limited its options, Mr. Dobbins asserts. Mr. Bush’s administration had favored an approach that called for a new Iraqi constitution to be drafted before holding elections for a new government, and Mr. Dobbins sees much merit in that plan. But to carry out such a methodical strategy, he says, the United States needed a higher degree of public support and patience on the part of ordinary Iraqis and more success in establishing security than it has been able to achieve. “Occupied people look first for security,” Mr. Dobbins said. “If you provide security, they will provide cooperation,” he added. “If you are not providing security, they will remain passive, uncommitted and will allow extremists to circulate in their midst”. Stung by the continued turmoil in Iraq and continued resistance to the American role there, the Bush administration has recently changed course: it is now seeking to establish a provisional government in advance of a constitution. “A provisional government does seem to me to be feasible and almost inevitable,” Mr. Dobbins said. “The opportunity to be able to more methodically put in place the prerequisites for a genuine democratic system before you move to Iraqi self-government has been lost”. There are many problems in Iraq. But according to Mr. Dobbins’s analysis, some of the American wounds have been self-inflicted. At this point, Mr. Dobbins is urging a major course correction. The Bush administration, he says, should expedite three transitions. First, he says, the United States should speed the transition to a provisional government, something the Bush administration has recently decided to do. Second, Mr. Dobbins says, the American-led occupation authority headed by Mr. Bremer should be replaced by an international administration, which would be headed by a new high commissioner for Iraq. Third, NATO should take on the peacekeeping mission in Iraq. While Mr. Dobbins believes it is important to quickly grant the Iraqis more sovereignty by establishing a provisional government, he also argues that a group of unelected Iraqi officials cannot be relied on to continue the trend toward democracy. So oversight is needed. But it needs to be a truly international oversight, he argues, to share the burden for the occupation and give it more legitimacy inside and outside Iraq. The Bush administration is unlikely to cede control to an international body. One of the administration’s objections, Mr. Dobbins reports, is that such a move would enable an international organization, and not the United States, to decide when the nation-building mission was over and when the troops could leave. That could mean that the effort could drag on for years, as it has in the Balkans. But given the difficulties in Iraq, a long-term commitment to the political and physical reconstruction of Iraq and the lengthy deployment of peacekeeping forces seem to be unavoidable. Citing the lessons of the past decade, Mr. Dobbins argues that it will even be desirable. Long, rather than short, engagements, he said, are more likely to succeed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/21/international/middleeast/21CND-GORD.html?hp