What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building

Introduction
LATE ONE NIGHT IN MAY 2003, I WAS IN A MILITARY transport plane somewhere over the Mediterranean, on my way to a stint as constitutional adviser to the American occupation authorities in Iraq. In the dozen or so rows of seats that had been jerry-rigged in the open belly of the aircraft, most of the passengers--all in various aspects of the advising business--were dozing, shivering slightly for the last time before we hit the Baghdad heat. The adrenaline pumping through me, I was rereading the best modern book on the Iraqi Shi'a1 and hastily trying to teach myself some Iraqi colloquial dialect.
Pausing to take in the moment, I glanced around at my new colleagues. Those who were awake were reading intently. When I saw what they were reading, though, a chill crept over me, too. Not one seemed to need a refresher on Iraq or the Gulf region. Without exception, they were reading new books on the American occupation and reconstruction of Germany and Japan.
My initial shock at my colleagues' reading matter was almost purely situational. Although it is possible to draw some more than superficial analogies between Ba"thism and National Socialism,2 Iraq was nothing like postwar Germany and Japan. Economic, political, social, and cultural conditions in Iraq after the U.S. invasion were distinct from any occupation situation that anyone had ever encountered, and if there was to be any hope of handling the situation effectively, the first step was surely to immerse oneself in what information was available about the country. The task felt classically orientalist, in the sense of gathering knowledge in order to exert control; but what other choice was there? Once you had agreed to go to Iraq as part of the occupation, you could go ignorant, or you could try to learn as much as possible.
But there was another, deeper problem with thinking of Iraq in terms borrowed from the nation-building experiences of the post-World War II era. We were occupying Iraq for reasons very different from those underlying our occupations of Germany and Japan. The most obvious difference was that the Axis powers had attacked us, and that we had then, with no other choice, fought and defeated them in a world war of unprecedented horror. By contrast, our war in Iraq, framed though it might have been in terms of preemptive self-protection, had been essentially voluntary. More to the point, however, the purposes of our occupation and reconstruction efforts in the second half of the 1940s were fundamentally different from the purposes of the task we were poised to undertake in Iraq. Different strategic objectives call for different tactics; but that is not all. The different purposes of contemporary nation building also call for a new and different ethical approach, one grounded in a normative evaluation of what we set out to achieve, the means and attitudes we adopt in the process, and a realistic sense of what success or failure would look like. We need, in short, an ethics of nation building suitable to our circumstances.
The place to begin the enquiry after such an ethics is with a clear-eyed, honest assessment of the purposes of nation building today, whether in Iraq or elsewhere--and that is the topic of the first chapter, in which I offer an explanation of how nation building can serve the nation builder's security interests, and how failed or incomplete nation building can harm them. In brief, I argue that strong countries like the United States and the Western European powers have an interest in building nation-states that seem reasonably legitimate to their citizens, because failed states and those perceived as illegitimately imposed from outside are likely to generate terror. I then defend self-protective nation building from the ethical challenge that its motives doom it to immorality.
The second chapter confronts the legacy of paternalism that, inherited from the ideology of empire, pervades the theory and practice of nation building today. I propose that nation building can be salvaged ethically only if it is stripped down to the modest proposition that the nation builder exercises temporary political authority as trustee on behalf of the people being governed, in much the same way that an elected government does. The fact that nation builders do not stand for election means they must authorize alternative means for the people whom they are governing to monitor their performance: free speech, assembly, and the active participation in government of the citizens of the country being ruled from the outside.
In the third and final chapter I consider how elections ought to figure in the nation-building process. Too much has been made of the capacity of elections to reflect the general will, and too little of their value in revealing voters' leadership preferences and in checking the arbitrary exercise of power.