Nation Building II.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: World Watcher - George W. Bush's foreign policy - Brief Article

GEORGE BUSH campaigned in 2000 as someone dead set against "nation building" as he saw it in Clinton/Gore terms. He regarded it as inappropriate to place trained fighting U.S. troops in danger (and debt) simply to keep combatants apart while political institutions were being constructed.

As with many other policies after Sept. 11, the President has made a 180 [degrees] turn. It is the master challenge that he has now undertaken in Afghanistan, trying to determine how to take tribes and factions that have fought and killed each other for centuries and transform them into some alternative to the Taliban. How, ever, why not start with the most difficult task? If successful, the others will be easy.

There unquestionably are others. The Taliban demonstrated so effectively the error of choosing the enemy of your enemy as your friend. As previously happened with the Pol Pot government in Cambodia, this realist strategy from classic international politics (read Henry Kissinger for the modern version) came back to bite us when Pol Pot slaughtered millions of his own countrymen while the U.S. kept his seat warm at the United Nations because he opposed the North Vietnamese. So it was with the Taliban, whose efforts the U.S. supported when they were directed against the Soviets in the 1980s.

We have made this same mistake repeatedly. Expediency has been the substitute for strategy, common ideology, and compatible culture in choosing our allies and condoning their behavior. Beyond the Mujahedeen and Pol Pot, we can recall readily, in the historical context, governments of Iran, Guatemala, Nicaragua, South Vietnam, Zaire, and many others that have fallen as a result of their internal contradictions, and America's reputation has fallen with them.

So here we are again, but Bush has a chance, in his new nation-building mode, to put all that fight. He can easily see the handwriting on the wall that stems from where the U.S. is today and change direction--not to accommodate the immediate, but to repair the U.S. position for the future. Here are some nation-building efforts he should consider. These are not necessarily in order, but recent events dictate some priorities.

Palestine. By all reckoning except that of the Israelis, there needs to be one. Despite other challenges to the existence of Israel that might come later, nothing can be settled in the Middle East until the Palestinians have a nation of their own, with a sense of sovereignty that doesn't exist...