ABSTRACT
The terms “nation-building” and “state-building” are often used interchangeably, yet the two are not synonymous. The difference between them is comparable to the difference between a “nation” and a “state.” While the latter is a territorially de ned entity, encompassed by internationally recognized boundaries, and governed by a political power capable of exercising a monopoly of coercive force, the former identi es a people bound together by shared historic, ethnic, cultural, and/or linguistic ties. In some parts of the world – in most of Western Europe, for example – this distinction is largely academic in so far as state and nation coincide; in other regions, such as the Middle East, and particularly, the state of Iraq, this distinction has real and enduring relevance. Iraq has been a state since the early 1920s and at times, indeed, a highly ef cient and productive state. However, it has never been a nation. As a consequence, nation-building in Iraq adds layers of complexity that previous nation-building efforts, in Germany and Japan, say, were never forced to confront. To succeed in Iraq, the United States must rebuild Iraq’s economic, physical and social infrastructure virtually from scratch while simultaneously ushering into place and nurturing a political system that is democratic, pluralistic and tolerant. This has to be reached while facing well-organized and violent insurgency whose major goal is to prevent the U.S. from succeeding, and it must leave in place an Iraq that, for the rst time in its history, is at peace with itself and where all its disparate groups accept the state as a legitimate entity. Yet the problems facing the U.S. are, in some ways, even more acute than this suggests. In the following analysis it is argued that as the occupation has proceeded, the U.S. has found itself increasingly locked into a series of vicious cycles from which there is no obvious escape. The most immediate of these is that the continued presence of occupation forces seems to fuel the insurgency, yet their withdrawal would almost certainly tip the country into fullscale civil war. More ominously for the long-term stability, even viability of Iraq as a state, the introduction of democracy via the two elections of January and December 2005 appears have exacerbated rather than soothed historical divisions. Hence, the U.S.’s pursuit of democracy in Iraq has ended up further undermining the country’s historically fragile sense of national unity and may, ultimately, rip the country apart. Such an outcome would have disastrous consequences for Iraq, the broader Gulf region, and future U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East.
