Nation-building and "Mission Accomplished"

As we know, last week was the sixth anniversary of Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished” in that sexy Top-Gun photo op on 1 May 2003. He did this after only 42 days of fighting.

It’s not just that he didn’t even understand what kind of war he was fighting – the few weeks of WWII-style conventional warfare were only a prelude to years of counterinsurgency fighting, with the result that 98 percent of the casualties happened after “Mission Accomplished”.

It’s also that he had no clue how hard building a nation is. Building a government, a constitution, a financial sector, an education sector, security, utilities, health care, communications, transportation, the oil sector, and making it all work effectively – he had no clue.

A clear sign that he had no clue, is that he essentially took the foreign policy portfolio away from the State Department – the people who actually know how to do that stuff – and gave it to the Pentagon. For all intents and purposes, Rumsfeld was both Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.

Let me illustrate how badly Bush underestimated the task in Iraq, by looking at how Constitutions are built.

America was very fortunate in its founding fathers: incredibly talented, selfless, high-minded men came together for a noble purpose. But even they screwed it up completely. The first time they tried it, they came up with the Articles of Confederation, which proved very quickly to be so unworkable that within a couple of years they were talking about a do-over. Finally they went to Philadelphia, agreed to throw out the Articles, and started over, eventually drafting our current Constitution. And even then they realized that they had got it wrong, and would need to keep making changes. Accordingly they made a provision for amendments, and added ten of them almost before the ink was dry on the original Constitution. And it’s been amended many times since.

Britain: for a thousand years they have bumbled along with no written Constitution at all. It’s all a jumble of tradition, statutory law, case law, Parliamentary procedure and whim, and other bits and bobs.

France: the reason they have the Fifth Republic is that that first four Republics collapsed.

Germany: after WWI they put together a very admirable effort to draft a new, progressive Constitution. Within 14 years the constitution led to...Hitler and the Nazis.

My personal favourite: for about 200 years, the Polish parliament or Sejm, consisting of about 135 people, actually required that laws pass by unanimous vote within six weeks and also win the approval of the king. To make such unanimity even remotely possible, exhaustive discussions were necessary. Also, for most of this period, if a bill was vetoed in a particular session, then all of the legislation from the entire session could be nullified, because the body of law passed in that session was considered to be one unit. By the late 1600s the government was paralyzed. Finally in 1791 the veto rule was abolished. But it was too late: by the time the Poles fixed the problem, Russia, Prussia and Austria had taken advantage of the Polish chaos to rip Poland to pieces and annex its territory. Poland ceased to exist because, in two hundred years, its leaders couldn’t figure out how to build a flexible governing body.

The thing is, these were mostly countries with much more stability than Iraq in 2003: they didn’t have to deal with the simmering hatreds between Sunni and Shia and Kurd, or the interference from Iran and Syria, or the volatile issues such as oil revenues and dealing with the Baathists.

Nation-building takes time, usually money, clear thinking, and a bit of luck.

If Bush’s putrid inner circle – the few people Bush actually listened to – had include even one person who knows the history of these things, he might have been persuaded not to do his touchdown victory dance until we were actually in the end zone.