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The challenges facing the United States in Iraq today are formidable. Still, it is possible to draw valuable lessons from America's previous experiences with nation-building. There are four main lessons to be learned for Iraq.

The first lesson is that democratic nation-building can work given sufficient inputs of resources. These inputs, however, can be very high. Regarding military forces, Figure 3 takes the numbers of troops used in the previous cases of nation-building and projects, for each, a proportionally equivalent force for the Iraqi population over the next decade. For example, if Kosovo levels of troop commitments were deployed to Iraq, the number would be some 500,000 U.S. and coalition troops through 2005. (There are roughly 150,000 coalition troops stationed in Iraq today.) To provide troop coverage at Bosnia levels, the requisite troop figures would be 460,000 initially, falling to 258,000 by 2005 and 145,000 by 2008.

In addition to military forces, it is often important to deploy a significant number of international civil police. To achieve a level comparable to the nearly 5,000 police deployed in Kosovo, Iraq would need an infusion of 53,000 international civil police officers through 2005 (in addition to the forces represented in Figure 3).

It is too early to predict with accuracy the required levels of foreign aid, but we can draw comparisons with the previous historical cases. Figure 4 takes the amount of foreign aid provided in six of the seven previous cases of nation-building and projects proportionally equivalent figures for the Iraqi population over the next two years. If Bosnia levels of foreign aid per capita were provided to Iraq, the country would require some $36 billion in aid from now through 2005. Conversely, aid at the same level as Afghanistan would total $1 billion over the next two years.

We at RAND believe that Iraq will require substantial external funds for humanitarian assistance and budgetary support. It is highly unlikely that taxes on the Iraqi oil sector will be adequate to fund the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy in the near future. Judging by the experiences of Bosnia and Kosovo, territories that have higher per capita incomes than Iraq, budgetary support will be necessary for quite some time. To manage immediate operating expenditures, we suggest that the post-conflict authorities in Iraq first establish a reasonable level of expenditures, then create a transparent tax system, and ask foreign donors to pick up the difference until the nation gets on its feet. We believe that this will be the most efficacious avenue to economic recovery.

At the same time, we suspect that Iraq will not receive the same per capita levels of foreign troops, police, or economic aid as did either Bosnia or Kosovo. Figures of 500,000 troops or $36 billion in aid are beyond the capacity of even the world's only superpower to generate or sustain. Even half those levels will require the United States to broaden participation in Iraq's post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction well beyond the comparatively narrow coalition that fought the war, thereby mounting a broader international effort on the Balkan models. According to the lessons learned, the ultimate consequences for Iraq of a failure to generate adequate international manpower and money are likely to be lower levels of security, higher casualties sustained and inflicted, lower economic growth rates, and slower, less thoroughgoing political transformation.

The second lesson for Iraq is that short departure deadlines are incompatible with nation-building. The United States will succeed only if it makes a long-term commitment to establishing strong democratic institutions and does not beat a hasty retreat tied to artificial deadlines. Moreover, setting premature dates for early national elections can be counterproductive.

Third, important hindrances to nation-building include both internal fragmentation (along political, ethnic, or sectarian lines) and a lack of external support from neighboring states. Germany and Japan had homogeneous societies. Bosnia and Kosovo had neighbors that, following the democratic transitions in Croatia and Serbia, collaborated with the international community. Iraq could combine the worst of both worlds, lacking both internal cohesion and regional support. The United States should consider putting a consultative mechanism in place, on the model of the Peace Implementation Council in the Balkans or the "Two Plus Six" group that involved Afghanistan's six neighbors plus Russia and the United States, as a means of consulting with the neighboring countries of Iraq.

Fourth, building a democracy, a strong economy, and long-term legitimacy depends in each case on striking the balance between international burden-sharing and unity of command. As noted above, the United States is unlikely to be able to generate adequate levels of troops, money, or endurance as long as it relies principally upon the limited coalition with which it fought the war. On the other hand, engaging a broader coalition, to include major countries that will expect to secure influence commensurate with their contributions, will require either new institutional arrangements or the extension of existing ones, such as NATO.

In its early months, the American-led stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq have not gone as smoothly as might be expected, given abundant, recent, and relevant American experience. This is, after all, the sixth major nation-building enterprise the United States has mounted in eleven years, and the fifth in a Muslim nation or province.

Many of the initial difficulties in Iraq have been encountered elsewhere. Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Afghanistan also experienced the rapid and utter collapse of their prior regimes. In each of those instances, the local police, courts, penal services, and militaries were destroyed, disrupted, disbanded, and/or discredited. They were consequently unavailable to fill the postconflict security gap. In Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, extremist elements emerged to fill the resultant vacuum of power. In all five cases, organized crime quickly developed into a major challenge to the occupying authority.

In Bosnia and Kosovo, the external stabilization forces ultimately proved adequate to surmount these challenges. In Somalia and Afghanistan, they did not or have not yet, respectively.

Throughout the 1990s, the management of each major stabilization and reconstruction mission represented a marginal advance over its predecessor, but in the past several years this modestly positive learning curve has not been sustained. The Afghan mission cannot yet be deemed more successful than the one in Haiti. It is certainly too early to evaluate the success of the Iraqi nation-building mission, but its first few months do not raise it above those in Bosnia and Kosovo at a similar stage.

Over the past decade, the United States has made major investments in the combat efficiency of its forces. The return on investment has been evident in the dramatic improvements demonstrated from one campaign to the next, from Desert Storm to the Kosovo air campaign to Operation Iraqi Freedom. But there has been no comparable increase in the capacity of U.S. armed forces, or of U.S. civilian agencies for that matter, to conduct post-combat stabilization and reconstruction operations.

Nation-building has been a controversial mission over the past decade, and the extent of this controversy has undoubtedly curtailed the investments needed to do these tasks better. So has institutional resistance in both the state and defense departments, neither of which regards nation-building among its core missions. As a result, successive administrations tend to treat each new such mission as if it were the first and, more importantly, the last.

This expectation is unlikely to be realized any time soon. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration conducted a major nation-building intervention, on the average, every two years. The current administration, despite a strong disinclination to engage American armed forces in these activities, has launched two major such enterprises in a period of eighteen months.

Post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction with the objective of promoting a transition to democracy appear to be the inescapable responsibility of the world's only superpower. Therefore, in addition to securing the major resources that will be needed to carry through the current operation in Iraq to success, the United States ought to make the smaller long-term investments in its own institutional capacity to conduct such operations. In this way, the ongoing improvements in combat performance of American forces could be matched by improvements in the postconflict performance of our government as a whole.

Related Reading

America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, James Dobbins, John G. McGinn, Keith Crane, Seth G. Jones, Rollie Lal, Andrew Rathmell, Rachel Swanger, Anga Timilsina, RAND/ MR-1753-RC, 2003, 280 pp., ISBN 0-8330-3460-X.

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