What We Owe Iraq

War and the Ethics of Nation Building

Noah Feldman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400826223
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What do we owe Iraq?
America is up to its neck in nation building--but the public debate, focused on getting the troops home, devotes little attention to why we are building a new Iraqi nation, what success would look like, or what principles should guide us. What We Owe Iraq sets out to shift the terms of the debate, acknowledging that we are nation building to protect ourselves while demanding that we put the interests of the people being governed--whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, or elsewhere--ahead of our own when we exercise power over them.
Noah Feldman argues that to prevent nation building from turning into a paternalistic, colonialist charade, we urgently need a new, humbler approach. Nation builders should focus on providing security, without arrogantly claiming any special expertise in how successful nation-states should be made. Drawing on his personal experiences in Iraq as a constitutional adviser, Feldman offers enduring insights into the power dynamics between the American occupiers and the Iraqis, and tackles issues such as Iraqi elections, the prospect of successful democratization, and the way home.
Elections do not end the occupier's responsibility. Unless asked to leave, we must resist the temptation of a military pullout before a legitimately elected government can maintain order and govern effectively. But elections that create a legitimate democracy are also the only way a nation builder can put itself out of business and--eventually--send its troops home.
Feldman's new afterword brings the Iraq story up-to-date since the book's original publication in 2004, and asks whether the United States has acted ethically in pushing the political process in Iraq while failing to control the security situation; it also revisits the question of when, and how, to withdraw.

CHAPTER ONE

Nation Building: Objectives

TO BEGIN, THEN, LET ME PROPOSE AN ACCOUNT OF WHY the United States has engaged in nation building in Iraq, and how this undertaking differs from earlier American nation-building efforts. From the outset of the Cold War, the American objective in nation building was to create rich, stable, independent, capital-driven states in order to strengthen the American alliance that was then called “the free world” against the Soviet Union and its satellites. This approach met with some remarkable successes—South Korea’s rags-to-riches story springs to mind—but its paradigmatic successful cases were Germany and Japan themselves. Nation building in Germany and Japan aimed to transform powerful enemies into prosperous allies in an emerging new struggle with the Soviet Union. Knowing that these nations had the capacity for unity, organization, and productivity, we sought to make them over to move them into our column. With U.S. supervision and assistance, America’s former enemies were made into its economic competitors for no better reason than that a strong Germany and a strong Japan could help the United States survive—or, as it turned out, win—the Cold War. The objective was not to build democratic states for the benefit of their citizens—a glance at U.S. support of authoritarian regimes from Southeast Asia to Latin America suffices to prove that. It was far less important that Germany and Japan be democratic than that they be capitalist and rich. The objective was to create nations that would, by a complex combination of external pressure and the financial self-interest of elites, take our side in a global war and be useful to us in it.¹

Today, with the Cold War behind us, the objective in nation building cannot be to gain allies in some global war against an easily identifiable enemy. At once more modest and more ambitious, our objective must be to build stable, legitimate states whose own citizens will not seek to destroy us. States that enjoy legitimacy among the overwhelming majority of their own citizens and that allow the possibility of changing policy by democratic means serve our common interest in collective security. The best route to self-preservation lies in the creation of states that respect individual liberties, both political and civil. In short: the objective of nation building ought to be the creation of reasonably legitimate, reasonably liberal democracies.

The threat that powerful nations face today is not total destruction by ballistic missiles. It is massive, but nonetheless not total, destruction by the means we are accustomed to call “terrorist.” The danger posed by terrorism is arguably not existential in the same sense as the Cold War threat: attacks like those of September 11 may or may not have the capacity to destroy us utterly. A smuggled nuclear weapon could destroy lower Manhattan, while the Soviets had the capacity to destroy every population center in the country. Yet there can be no question that terrorism is today the greatest threat to the United States, to its allies, and even to its erstwhile enemies like the states of the former Soviet Union.

Few words are thrown around more loosely than “terrorism,” so let me offer a functional definition. Most contemporary uses of the word “terrorism” are trying to describe a type of violence perpetrated by nonstate actors against civilian targets. This definition is not uncontroversial, and there are many who would immediately point out that it unfairly excludes state terrorism, executed by state actors against civilians. But let me simply point out that the need for the adjective “state” in the phrase “state terrorism” strongly suggests, as a descriptive matter, that our ordinary English-language usage of the term “terrorism” encompasses only nonstate violence.

The reason I suggest that the greatest threat today comes from terrorism is not simply that the attacks of September 11 still loom large in all our minds. When speaking of terrorism, one lapses easily into the error of overgeneralizing from recent, salient experience—falling prey to what behavioral psychologists and economists call the “availability heuristic”—and I am trying hard to avoid this mistake.² Rather, the reason to consider terrorism the gravest present threat to us, above the missiles of hostile powers like North Korea, and above even the epochal growth (and potential belligerence) of China, is that state actors for the last half century—and indeed beyond—have shown a consistent propensity to respond to the negative reinforcement of threatened destruction. Leaders of states almost never attack other states or peoples if they know to a relatively high probability that doing so will result in their removal or death. One could call this a rational-actor model of the state, but introducing the subtle topic of rationality here may actually obfuscate more than it clarifies. It will be enough to say that North Korea, for all its weapons capability, has not attacked South Korea and almost certainly will not attack so long as its leaders understand that such an attack would result in their deaths. (The same could arguably be said of the nuclear face-off between Pakistan and India, which resembles the Cold War writ small in its promise of mutually assured destruction.) Because no state could directly attack the United States without guaranteeing the death and destruction of its leaders, we can be reasonably certain of being safe from such an attack. Some states could conceivably try to inflict violence without being blamed for it by supporting third-party terrorists, as Libya did during the 1980s and early 1990s. But, as demonstrated by the eventual response of Muammar Qadhafi to U.S. bombings and broader economic sanctions, such indirect violence can usually be traced to its source and deterred.³ Because it is difficult for states to avoid responsibility for their actions, deterrence is on the whole a reliable method for dealing with state-based threats.

Nonstate violent actors, on the other hand, typically do not respond to the threat of their own destruction in the predictable way that state actors do. They are prepared to attack even when the consequences for themselves will be dire. One reason may be that nonstate actors are prepared to die for their causes, whereas ordinary government officials are less likely to lay down their lives; but states also spawn warriors ready to give their lives for heroism, nationalism, or faith, so this is unlikely to be the major reason why terrorists do not respond predictably to retaliatory threat. More likely, the reason terrorists cannot reliably be deterred as states can is that retaliation against terror is often very nonspecific. Unlike states, terrorist organizations can melt away. Al-Qaida used the Taliban state in Afghanistan as its staging ground; and after the U.S. invasion, that state ceased to exist while al-Qaida has maintained its shadowy presence almost to the degree that it did before. Government leaders may try to disappear, as Saddam did, but experience suggests that it is harder for them to avoid capture than it is for terrorists. Mullah Omar of the Taliban remains at large, but he was always more of a rebel leader than a head of state, preserving his anonymity by never appearing in public unmasked.

The point sounds obvious, but it bears repeating, because too often the behavior of terrorists is thought to be distinctive solely because of their extreme ideology. Unlike states, terrorist organizations cannot be found in any one particular spot. You cannot eliminate them by occupying the radio station and the national bank. This is an important reason why terrorist leaders generally seem more confident than state leaders that other hydra heads will replace them should theirs be cut off. It is not that terrorists are necessarily any more certain of the justice of their causes than are the leaders of governments. It is just that when the apparatus of the state has been captured, no new “president” can emerge without the consent of the occupier—all that is possible is an insurgency. Kill Osama bin Laden, however, and all it takes for another to assume his role is to tell the organization’s adherents and supporters that he has taken charge. Indeed, it would even be possible to kill every present al-Qaida member and for the organization to be reborn in the next moment via a new group of persons who assumed the mission. Like the Dread Pirate Roberts in the movie, all the nonstate actor needs to perpetuate himself is a name.

Terrorism, then, tops our threat list because of its nonresponsiveness to the disincentives we have been accustomed to use. It follows that our predominant security goal ought to be reducing the risk of terrorist attack. That does not mean reducing the risk at any cost. There are those already who believe that the United States poses a greater risk to world security than do the terrorists them—selves a frightening thought, although one that for the most part still seems to be meant rhetorically. We cannot defensibly take every step that would reduce the terrorist threat to zero, any more than we could justify putting the country in lockdown to prevent any crime. But we can, we may, and we ought to take steps to reduce the threat of terrorism to the extent we can do so in a way that is consistent with our moral commitments. Specifically, we can identify the reduction of the threat of terror as a permissible objective—and indeed the primary objective—for our nation-building efforts.

Let me hasten to distinguish two different possible versions of the argument that reducing the threat of nonstate violence against civilians ought to be the aim of nation building. One possible approach—let’s call it the “war on terror”—aims to create and nurture stable states so that they can crush the nonstate terrorists who threaten their existence and our lives. This view begins with the plausible claim that weak or failing states are breeding grounds for nonstate violence. Terrorists in weak states may aim to assume control of the state in which they live—nonstate Serbian militias in Bosnia, for example—or their long-term objective may be to gain control of some other neighboring states, as in the case of Sierra Leonean rebels hunkered down in Liberia. Still another possibility is that the terrorists are opportunistically gaining a foothold in the weak state to launch attacks on distant enemies—more or less al-Qaida’s posture in Taliban Afghanistan.

From the premise that weak states breed terror, the theorists of the war on terror reason that what we need are strong states with the capacity to suppress resistance. Rather than seeking to strengthen weak states by, for example, encouraging economic or political practices that might win the loyalties of a larger number of citizens, the “war on terror” approach focuses on consolidating states’ coercive power. The government of Colombia must be strengthened with military aid so it can subdue the FARC; Peru must be powerful enough to shut down the Shining Path. Politics and wealth redistribution do not ordinarily figure as strengthening devices. We can be glad, maintain the advocates of the war on terror, that the Egyptian government under Hosni Mubarak proved itself durable enough during the 1990s to deal with the terrorists who sought its overthrow, and we must help strengthen the Pakistani state, supporting the vulnerable-looking Pervez Musharraf so that he does not fall to the radical Islamist terrorists who made some dozen attempts on his life in 2003–4 alone.

According to this view, we can comfortably say that we are at war with “terrorism” as a phenomenon because, with the Cold War over, our interests are always aligned with states against nonstate violent actors. Those states could be dangerous abroad and oppressive at home, but because their leaders are likely to respond to our external disincentive, they will be highly unlikely to attack us. States that self-consciously export terror are very unlikely to direct that terror against us, because doing so is just too risky. The ones we need to fear are the nonstate actors whom we cannot successfully discourage on our own. We will never know as much about how to defeat these terrorists as will their local governments; so we should back those governments in their local wars against terrorism to save ourselves. In a globalized environment, nowhere is more than a day’s plane ride away. Under these conditions, terrorism anywhere is dangerous everywhere.

Notice that this realist account of the war on terror would not have supported the American-led invasion of Iraq. Whatever its considerable demerits under the genocidal Saddam, Iraq was a strong state. Although supporters of the Iraq war who also purported to care about the war on terror tried to assimilate the two by claiming that Saddam supported international terror, the evidence for this claim was slight, perhaps slighter even than the evidence for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Beyond the evidentiary problem, there was the further difficulty that Saddam had always shown himself to be motivated by a marked self-preservation instinct. (He had, after all, survived the invasion of Kuwait, gambling correctly that the United States would not want to take on the responsibility of governing Iraq that would have followed inexorably from a march on Baghdad.)

Invading Iraq in 2003, defeating and then disbanding the Iraqi army, created in Iraq a weak state—or maybe no state at all—in lieu of the strong one that had existed. The invasion and its aftermath thereby inaugurated a rich, new potential breeding environment for terror. The strength of the realist argument for the war on terror is one major reason why so many in the American foreign policy establishment opposed the war in Iraq after they had supported the war in Afghanistan, which in theory at least sought to replace a weak state that hosted terror with a stronger state that would not. It is also why post hoc critics of the Iraq war are not merely posturing when they assert that the war did not make the United States safer from the threat of terror. In fact, it could reasonably be argued that the occupation of Iraq not only created an environment in which terror could emerge, but gave Iraqis and other Muslims hostile to the American presence in the region an excellent excuse for new terror.

Notwithstanding the evident appeal of foreign-policy realism in a dangerous world, I believe that this version of the “war on terror” argument, with its generally applicable principle of supporting strong states against nonstate violence, is ultimately unsatisfying and misplaced. To begin with, such a war on terror is likely to be self-defeating. Where many citizens think the government is illegitimate, we are likely to find terrorist resistance continuing despite the exercise of increased force by the repressive state. This is not to deny that autocratic states can achieve local victories: Egypt really did break the backs of its local Islamist terrorist resistance over the course of the decade that followed Sadat’s assassination.⁴ Repression can, on occasion, defeat terror within a given country. In some cases, especially where the government in question enjoys a high degree of internal legitimacy, strengthening it to facilitate its fight against domestic terrorists may turn out to be a productive strategy. But at least some terrorist organizations will turn out to be highly mobile, so that displacing them will have unintended consequences. Beat them in one place, and they will look elsewhere for leverage. A cadre of Egyptian Islamist terrorists, defeated and thus displaced from their traditional battle against the Egyptian state in the 1990s, joined forces with Osama bin Laden to create al-Qaida.

The upshot is that not only weak or failed states unintentionally “breed” terrorism. Democratically illegitimate states do, too—especially when citizens perceive their regimes to have been imposed by outside forces that can themselves be targeted for terrorist attack.⁵ Al-Qaida grew out of bin Laden’s opposition to the Saudi state; the group made the United States a target less out of outrage at American moral corruption than because of U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, which bin Laden conceptualized as an illegitimate occupation of Muslim lands. In al-Qaida’s perceptual scheme, the United States is the “far enemy,” while the “near enemy” is not Israel but the Saudi monarchy itself. Palestinian terrorism has grown under conditions in the West Bank and Gaza in which the “government”—whether one considers that to be the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli occupational administration, both, or neither—appears to ordinary Palestinians illegitimate and externally imposed. In general, Islamist terrorists have long been motivated by their grievances against the authoritarian states in which they live.⁶

Of course there can be deeply divergent views about what constitutes a legitimate government. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was influenced by a domestic movement that believed the U.S. government itself to be illeg...