What We Owe Iraq

By Bradford Plumer, MotherJones.com. Posted January 21, 2005.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, President Bush spoke out against "extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions." But after the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, nation-building quickly became a critical piece of American foreign policy. And while another Iraq-style invasion is probably out of the question anytime soon, the United States could easily find itself in another situation like that in Haiti, or Somalia, or Kosovo. So if, for better or worse, we will inevitably find ourselves on more nation-building enterprises, what sorts of responsibilities are involved? How can the United States go about nation-building in a prudent and ethical manner?

In his new book, What We Owe Iraq, Noah Feldman examines the nation-building project that the United States has undertaken in Iraq, using it to outline a set of ethical principles that any nation-builder must follow on its way towards creating a new democractic state. The first step, he writes, is to "immerse oneself in what information [is] available about the country." As a scholar of both constitutional law and Islam, Feldman was uniquely situated to understand how democracy might develop in an Islamic nation like Iraq, and in early 2003 the Coalition Provisional Authority asked him to help with planning for Iraq's constitutional design. Much of what he learned there informs his book's conclusion: “What we ultimately owe Iraq is to let the Iraqis grasp nationhood and sovereignty for themselves — and keep it, if they can." How we get there, however, is a more difficult matter.

Feldman, who is an associate professor of law at New York University and also wrote After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy, recently sat down with MotherJones.com to talk about the ethics of nation-building, his experiences in Iraq, and what we can expect from the upcoming elections there.

In your book you define nation-building as basically creating a democracy without holding elections right away. Can you outline briefly the responsibilities involved in nation-building?

Right, the reason you're doing nation-building is that you can't immediately hold elections. If you could hold elections right away, you could skip the nation-building process almost completely and just leave. But I'm describing situations where for whatever reason — a lack of security, say — it's just too soon to hold elections.

So the first duty of any nation-builder, under conditions of occupation, is to recognize that it is exercising political power on behalf of the people whom it is governing. And in that capacity, it has to take responsibility for acting in their interests, just like any other democratic government. So the nation-builder has to allow for oversight by the people who live in the country — through allowing free speech, free assembly, and encouraging active participation through various consultative bodies.

Can you explain how your concept of nation-building differs from how it's been defined in the past — by, for instance, the Hague Convention or the League of Nations?

Sure. Under the Hague Convention, the idea was that the occupier essentially held the occupied people in trust for their rightful sovereign — who was assumed to own those people himself. Under the League of Nations this view changed a little bit, so that now the occupier was supposed to hold in trust the future of the people who were being governed. They were assumed to be unready to rule themselves, so the view was that the occupying power would hold their political development in trust, as if they were children who needed to be brought up.

Under the view that I'm proposing, the only thing that the occupier holds in trust is the temporary authority to govern. It's exactly the same as when we elect a government, that government has authority only until the next set of elections. So my view entails much greater obligations of responsiveness and oversight than any other models do. And it assumes that in the relatively short-term future, authority will be transferred to the people who are being subjected to occupation, in order for them to divine their own political interests, and govern themselves.

Now, way back in early 2003, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner wanted to hand over Iraq as quickly as possible to the Iraqis. Do you think this was a mistake to try to avoid nation-building early on in Iraq?

Well, that decision was above Jay Garner's pay-grade. It wasn't that Jay Garner had this odd strategic vision. He was simply hired by the administration and sent out to be head of Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, because the Bush administration did not believe that it was capable of — or desirable — to govern Iraq. This was an administration that didn't want to do nation-building. Immediately on the fall of Saddam, they said, a new government could emerge. Somewhat by magic.

So that's why Jay Garner was given a job that included no governance component at all. He was just a soldier doing his job, making sure nobody starved — and nobody did — and getting reconstruction projects underway, which he did a little bit of, although probably not as much as even he would have liked to have done, because it turned out that the political disarray was so great and the looting meant that the job of reconstruction was really so much more enormous than anyone had really imagined.

Bradford Plumer is an editorial fellow at MotherJones.com.

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