U.S. ambassador speaks on conflict in Iraq

Not much could surprise a career diplomat who served as a U.S.
special envoy to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia.

But when that diplomat is unexpectedly questioned by the former
Spanish ambassador to the United Nations who referred to his
associate Kofi, it makes for a promising and exciting
experience.

And it was just that sort of experience that the UCLA community
was witness to Thursday evening, as Ambassador James Dobbins spoke
on the matter of nation-building. Inocencio Arias, the Spanish
ambassador, would later come to question him.

It was an intimate setting inside the Public Policy building
classroom where Dobbins outlined his recent research concerning the
history of nation-building and its applications to the conflict in
Iraq.

The central question Dobbins worked to answer in his lecture
centered on the issue of why the U.S. performance over the first
couple of years in Iraq was “so amateurish” and plagued
with “calculated ignorance.”

For Dobbins, the answer lay in the fact that lessons from past
instances of nation-building ““ Germany, Japan, Somalia,
Haiti, Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan ““ were not adequately
surveyed and applied.

Nation-building can be defined as the use of force in the
aftermath of a conflict designed to bring about a democratic state,
Dobbins said.

In Haiti, for example, key lessons included avoiding the desire
to expand a mission’s objective and maintaining an exit
policy with a clear deadline, he said.

The Bush administration’s decision to model
democratization of Iraq on experiences in Germany and Japan were
ill-fated, because they did not take into account some of the more
recent lessons learned.

“All in all it would have made more sense to treat Iraq on
the basis of what was learned in the Balkans,” Dobbin
said.

In both Bosnia and Kosovo, Dobbins said the heterogeneity of the
population was a critical impediment to peace. Similarly, he added
that ethnic tensions in Iraq today are thought to be one of the
most important barriers to democracy.

In assessing the situation in Iraq, Dobbins said the U.S. should
have anticipated that extremists would quickly work to fill the
“vacuum of power” that occurred when Saddam Hussein was
ousted. Such failures in foresight could have been prevented had
the U.S. studied recent nation-building efforts and prepared more
for their entrance into Baghdad, Dobbins said.

With an attentive audience comprised of diplomats, faculty and
students, questions regarding how the Bush administration was
currently operating in the region quickly followed.

Amy Zegart, a professor in the School of Public Affairs,
questioned how researchers and onlookers could measure success when
events were in the process of unfolding.

“The first thing you need to do is remember what you are
trying to achieve,” Dobbins began.

He added that a competent, noncorrupt government would most
likely take years and that just having elections was not an
indicator. The key to embarking on the road to success, Dobbins
said, was first establishing a safe and secure environment.

Arias, an ambassador to the U.N. in 2003, was witness to the
events unfolding as President Bush lobbied the international
organization to invade Iraq. One of his questions concerned how to
reconcile the fact that the U.S. entered Iraq for one reason, but
now uses another to justify its occupancy.

“The thing is, once a war is over, objectives change. We
didn’t invade Japan in World War II to enact regime change
… and while for the Bush administration, democratization may be
the last possible excuse, it doesn’t mean it’s not
reasonable,” Dobbins said.

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