Canada's Debate

Scott Tribe directed his readers to a post called Fighting the Surge here, and while I agree that it is thoughtful and interesting, the political theory student part of me can’t really agree with it. JJ writes that Iraq is broken, and broken to a degree that it can no longer be fixed; and the truth oft he matter is that Iraq was irreparably broken the second Saddam’s government was toppled.

Though I know the situations aren’t comparable, but I thought that the States should mirror whatever the Allies did in WWII in Germany and Japan. Some the reasons (I think) for the successful reconstruction of those countries, had to do with the sheer volume of troops, which lead to the total defeat of other side, followed by the complete replacement and reconstruction of political institutions. (I just want to put a caveat here again, that I am by no means an expert in WWII military history or contemporary military strategy. The extent of my understanding of the rules of war - stems from reading Michael Waltzer’s Just and Unjust Wars - an excellent book, btw). So yeah, my feeling was: whatever, however many troops you need - just do it! You want to invade a country? Well, jeez, at least have the decency to invade it “properly”.

The problem with this is that you are advocating “nation building,” which is a theory that just doesn’t work. In Germany and Japan the Allies were able to rebuild successfully because the “nation” already existed; all that was needed were new institutions to govern. In just about every other attempt to nation-build there was no universally existing “nation,” just a patchwork of local or religious identities. In this scenario the only way to create any sort of national institutions is to either create them with universal values, which is almost impossible; or to create them with the values of the predominant group, which alienates all the other groups. In either case, the government lacks the legitimacy necessary to replace the existing national regime, even if that regime held the nation together by force.

In Iraq the Bush government tried to blend the two approaches (deliberately) and ended up with the same results that it would have had if it had gone with a straight option: the governmment lacked the legitimacy necessary to hold the country together. The only possible outcomes then in this scenario is the government structure being replaced (not likely since the U.S. staked it’s own legitimacy to this one) and the Sunni insurgency is trying their damndest to go this route, the government itself changing to represent the entire country (as I said before is almost impossible) although this scenario is even more unlikely given that one group has already risen to dominance, or lastly the dominant group eliminating any subnational groups which it doesn’t represent to acquire legitimacy…

Any guesses on which one is happening?