REBUILDING IRAQ: NO JOB FOR A COALITION

  Artículo de Rachel Belton en “The Washington Post” del 28.04.2003

As the war in Iraq shifts from ending one regime to building another, America must pick a strategy for waging peace as effective as our strategy for waging war. Many thoughtful people hope to use a postwar international coalition to regain America's legitimacy abroad, so badly damaged in the lead-up to war. Coalitions are crucially important to America's war against terror. Yet a coalition is the wrong method for reconstructing Iraq.

The United Nations and international allies promised to rebuild democracy in Bosnia. Seven years later, they have departed -- only to hand over responsibility for the semi-state to the European Union. They failed again in Kosovo, where they are preventing a civil war but have brought little movement toward self-government in their four-year reign. In Afghanistan, international aid is coming too little and too late to support the fragile government.

The failure of these efforts to build autonomous, sovereign democracies lies in the very structure of international coalitions. Coalitions diffuse responsibility. When Bosnia failed to arrest war criminals, each coalition member could blame its compatriots. No one felt responsible for ensuring the legitimacy of the coalition -- or the success of the country. Slow funding from a coalition is also inevitable, given the multiple money streams and organizations that must be coordinated. Yet lack of disposable funds causes pro-Western politicians to lose ground to more shady leaders, often funded by less-savory states and criminal organizations, who can deliver results to the citizenry more quickly.

Reconstruction efforts often become the battlefields for unconnected struggles between coalition members. To gain the upper hand, "internationals" dissipate their time and energy playing politics against one another. Unable to agree on clear values and goals, and needing local allies for their fights, international organizations leave themselves at the mercy of local politicians. The locals who rise to the top after a war -- rarely the best of characters -- play agencies against one another to achieve their own purposes. As foreign countries beat out the local citizenry for the role of primary constituent, domestic politics is impoverished and viable democracy is delayed.

Poor political planning is one manifestation of bureaucratic international organizations' inability to think strategically. Broad goals and values for rebuilding government institutions are lost in the tactics of establishing and funding particular programs. As they run their small efforts, international organizations ignore strategic political junctures and critical pressure points crucial to moving a country toward self-rule and democracy.

Finally, coalitions overwhelm nascent, struggling local governments. Distrusting one another's information, international organizations send their own fact-finding missions, hold their own meetings with local politicians and publish their own reports. Local ministries, understaffed after purges of former party members, are barely able to meet the demands of their international overseers, much less undertake the actual work of running a country.

The military has led the only two successful attempts at postwar democratization. In Japan and Germany, defense officials took full responsibility. Used to thinking stra- tegically, they focused on overarching values and critical missions. The centralized defense structure allowed America's core values to remain consistent and penetrate every aspect of the mission. Yet, after setting and enforcing broad guidelines, they gave the Germans and Japanese great leeway in setting up their own governments. Perhaps most important, the military authorities did not want to remain. Unlike international organizations, whose entire job is to "help" other countries, the Pentagon has other work to do. It has every incentive to create a viable local government and then allow it the autonomy to function on its own.

Those who support multilateral reconstruction believe we can begin repairing rifts in the international system by diffusing responsibility for reconstruction. Yet under all proposed scenarios, America is going to run the reconstruction effort. Our detractors will still frame us as occupiers, while our attempts to placate international critics will sentence Iraq to a decade of uncertainty and limbo under international auspices.

Helping Iraq build a functioning democracy in which Iraqis can soon govern on their own is essential to our international legitimacy and crucial to the Iraqi people. The United Nations and other international organizations are staffed by many capable, intelligent, well-intentioned people. They should be encouraged to run humanitarian relief efforts in Iraq and should create a broad, multilateral coalition to control Iraq's oil revenue to expunge the accusation that this has been a war for oil. Yet in concert, they would fail to democratize Iraq and would prevent it from regaining its autonomy and sovereignty. The Pentagon has succeeded in the past, and it has the unified structure that will allow it to succeed again. Let it do the job.

Rachel Belton is writing a book on nation-building.