Breaking the state.

• Author: Menon, Rajan
• Position: Military intervention - Essay

The Middle East roils and one fact is certain: interventions end badly. For intervention leads to postwar reconstruction and postwar reconstruction leads to failure.

In the wake of the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor and Haiti--to take but some examples--"stabilization operations," "state building" and their terminological kin have become watchwords. If these undertakings are not part of an American administration's opening agenda, they seem to have a way of entering it. Do not be fooled into thinking Libya is any different. So it is useful to explore how it is that states get involved in these campaigns and what happens once they do. Invariably, though hardly inevitably, they do so in the aftermath of two types of military operations, each guided by rather different motives.

The first is that set of humanitarian interventions that are often prompted by calls of those who are being abused and slaughtered, whether by their own governments or by militias fighting civil wars. These interventions need not, of course, entail military force. If one visualizes humanitarian interventions as a continuum, diplomacy aimed at resolving the conflict lies at one end, military intercession at the other and various nonmilitary measures in between. Even fervent proponents of humanitarian intervention believe that it should be the last step--one taken when other feasible and reasonable responses to mass atrocities have been tried and found wanting. This said, advocates of the cause do ultimately insist that when all else fails and a government is either unable to halt internecine violence or, worse, is engaged in killing its own citizens, military action is appropriate, even essential, to save lives and end suffering.

The second category of intervention is not, pace the pious pronouncements of its initiators, driven by humanitarian considerations. These military adventures are predicated on the claim that there is a serious and imminent threat to be deterred, or a necessity to react in self-defense to a hostile provocation. This justification need not be convincing and may even be concocted; what distinguishes these acts from humanitarian interventions is that the intervening state does not present ethical considerations (saving innocents from harm, etc) as its principal motivation. The 2003 American attack on Iraq, for example, cannot be portrayed convincingly as one driven by humanitarian motives. Saddam Hussein was not then engaged in perpetrating mass murder, as he was during the 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds (during which the Reagan administration was backing him in his war against Iran), so the moral claims, which in any event were not at the heart of the Bush administration's case, were unpersuasive. Of course the alleged threat posed by Saddam was hardly self-evident either, but the justification lay--if anywhere--in the realm of national security. The American attack that toppled the Taliban, by contrast, did have a casus belli, even though there are sound reasons for debating whether unilateral military action was the wisest and sole recourse.

Yet no matter the cause (or rationale) for the intervention, the resultant common denominator is clear: when a regime is displaced, the initiators are forced to create a replacement and thus to enter the treacherous terrain of postconflict operations. The alternative to building institutions that eventually enable self-governance is to rule the country in which the intervention has occurred indefinitely--to engage in imperialism, in other words. Leave aside the myriad practical problems involved in occupying and governing people who are, or will soon become, determined to regain their independence. What is more important is that the days of colonialism are over and no modern variant will be acceptable to its supposed beneficiaries or justifiable to the rest of the world, or even to one's own citizens. None of the former colonies yearn for its return, even though some well-known commentators--notably Max Boot and Niall Ferguson--have proclaimed, perhaps overcome with nostalgia for the good old days, that what failed states really require is a bracing spell of imperial tutelage, with the United States assuming Britain's erstwhile, and supposedly benevolent, role as the guardian and mentor of those who are not quite ready for self-rule.

Moreover, both variants of military intervention segue into nation building because in the postimperial era, intervening states, especially if they are democracies accountable to impatient electorates, must present at the outset, or develop later, an "exit strategy." That, in turn, requires plans for the establishment of a minimally effective local government. Otherwise, the intervention will encounter mounting costs (in dollars and dead) that will erode...