Drawing Distinctions

My friend Justin Logan sounds a call for the United States to abandon the concept of nation building. I'm sympathetic to the impulse here -- I find it enormously frustrating that a lot of people look at Iraq and say to themselves "we need to get better at this." No, we don't. What we need to do is to not do that again. But that still raises the issue of what "this" is. As my other friend Mark Goldberg says:

That said, I still think that there is a great need for nation building and post conflict reconstruction in today's world. Enter UN Peacekeeping, which has a demonstrated (if under-appreciated) record of success in post conflict zones. Rather than trying to do a better job of invading and occupying countries, it may make more sense to broaden our support for the one organization that has some experience and expertise in this line of work.

It's worth saying that this isn't because of some kind of UN pixie dust that makes blue helmet missions work. Institutional knowledge factors are in play, but as I argue in Heads in the Sand a big peace of the puzzle is simply that it's very different to get involved in post-conflict reconstruction when you're talking about acting as a third party who steps in to keep the peace after a conflict ends, and getting involved in post-conflict reconstruction when the conflict that you're "post" was an invasion. In other words, helping to keep the peace when the parties to a conflict in a failed state are looking for a way out of the abyss is very different from deliberately smashing up a bunch of eggs and then deciding you need an omelet recipe.

On top of that, there's the matter of structure and legitimacy. The U.N., precisely because of many features that sometimes annoy Americans (universal membership, clumsy decision-making structure, etc.) is an exceedingly poor tool for domination, which makes it a good tool for reassuring people that you're not there to dominate them. Doing more to support these blue helmet missions would be much cheaper than another year in Iraq and would do more good besides.