Whither Nation-Building: Can the United States and the United Nations Harmonize Their Efforts?

May 5, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MR. MURAVCHIK:  If you'll find seats, we'll start the session.  Welcome.  Thank you for joining us.  I'm Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute, and it's my pleasure and honor to be the chairman of this session, although it's an honor I've earned only because this is the home field.  This is the third session in a series of panels that we're organizing, and there will be several more about the UN here at AEI this year.  But this is different from the ones we've had previously, and that is a cosponsored session by AEI and the UN Development Program.  And I said I'm chairing because it's home field, because I think the lion's share of the thought and work and organizing this panel was carried by David Yang of the UNDP office here in Washington, and it has been a delight for me to work with David, not only because he did most of the work. and thanks for making the arrangements to David's colleague, Inga Holly (ph), and to Karen Nichols and Molly McHugh here at AEI.

The subject of the discussion is the fraught one of post-conflict reconstruction and the roles of the U.S. and the UN and relations between them in carrying out that work.  We're privileged to have an extraordinarily fine panel:  Ambassador Robert Pearson of the State Department, Mark Malloch Brown of the USDP, and Larry Diamond of the--did I say something wrong?

MR.           :  You said USDP.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  I said USDP, okay.  All right.  I guess I don't need to correct myself since everybody in the room but me knows the name of this organization.  And Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, of Stanford University.  Larry also, adding to his vast expertise in this area, is recently back from Iraq, where he was working with the coalition as an adviser to the CPA about building democracy in Iraq.

I think that the folders you have have biographical information on each of the speakers, and I could easily wax on about their merits, but that would only take time away from them.  So rather than do that kind of formal introduction, let me refer you to the information in the packets and turn the floor right over to our speakers.  We'll begin with Mark Malloch Brown.  Mark, please?

MR. MALLOCH BROWN:  Thank you.  And I was already going to say that U.S.-UN relations can't be in that bad shape if AEI thinks it worth devoting a series of meetings to the UN.  This is good news.  And now to realize that one of its most eminent scholars already thinks of UNDP as USDP, it shows that we have achieved a complete alignment of objectives and approaches, and I declare the seminar closed.

[Laughter.]

MR. MALLOCH BROWN:  But let us try and convert Freudian slip into sort of intellectual foundation by arguing that, you know, I must say that I think that the temperature of U.S.-UN relations never gets as cold as some people think, but nor on the other hand are they often as warm as others euphorically hope.  There is a good, solid, pragmatic backbone to U.S.-UN relations which continue despite the drama of individual situations like Iraq, and not least, they continue through the complicated, difficult process of nation building, because at any one time a lot of much lower-profile efforts in this area are underway, and U.S. leadership in setting the political direction, U.S. leadership in helping us resource these operations, and U.S. support in allowing UNDP and the UN more broadly to put in place everything from the peacekeeping to the governance and administration arrangements is a critical partnership which continues largely unsung.  And, you know, just in the period of Iraq, there was cooperation in a continuing way on everything from Sudan to Cote d'Ivoire to Liberia, and to many long-term existing operations like Cyprus.  So I think it's always important to keep that context.

But having said that, we are all struggling in very new territory.  The post-'89 world is one where the sheer volume of nation-building activities has grown exponentially.  Of the 56 peacekeeping operations that the UN has launched since 1945, 42 of them have begun since 1989.  And obviously a little bit contrary to some of the rhetoric in town about a distaste for nation-building engagement by the U.S., the reality has been that the post-1989 emergence of the U.S. as a more dominant single superpower in the world has meant that willy-nilly it has been drawn into a great majority of those operations.

You know, I sometimes feel for the U.S. it can't get it right.  When it runs ahead of the pack in Iraq, it's criticized.  When it drags its heels behind the pack, as in the Balkans, when there was a reluctance to intervene in lifting the siege of Sarajevo and at various other points in that, it's criticized.  So from the point of view of an AEI audience, I can imagine you might just throw your hands in the air and say, you know, what can we do which would free us from this international criticism?  And I think, you know, in a sense some of this complaint about either moving too unilaterally and alone or holding out the rest of international public opinion and resisting involvement just comes with the territory.  It comes with the role you now play in the world.

But, of course, we've seen its most extreme manifestation since 9/11 when an administration which had threatened to break with this tradition of increasing engagement in nation building since 1989 has found that events have forced it in entirely the opposite direction.  But, of course, you know, obviously many in Washington have retained something of the unilateralist instinct that made them suspicious of nation building in the first place, so forced to engage, there has been a preference by many to try and do it alone.

You know, I will leave Larry in a way to comment on the difficulties of that approach in Iraq, but in a way, we do have to keep Iraq in context because it is something of a sui generis exercise in that I think probably there would be more agreement today than there might have been a year ago across all shades of opinion in this room if I say that probably the future nation-building activities that we, the U.S. and UN, have a mutual interest in, in most cases are going to be caused by internal collapse rather than external intervention.  We're going to see a lot more Haitis than Iraqs, where just the internal contradictions between governments not delivering on the promises they've made their citizens, democratic institutions just not delivering results, performance, and accountability, are more likely to lead to breakdown of states or, indeed, internal ethnic or regional or class disputes are likely to bring the breakdown of states than the situation of external intervention.

But, nevertheless, we try to find a new way of doing things, a new way of working together around this agenda of failed states, and, of course, a very different media world to the one in which my British forefathers sought to deal with these issues.  No longer can the correspondent at the London Times send home dispatches from the front by sea mail and his British readers read about some setback long after the event when it's too late for public opinion and pressure to make much difference.  Now, as we've all frequently observed, we try to deal with these issues in the complex context of what many call the CNN factor, where there is intense focus and concern news cycle by news cycle on the ups and downs of these conflicts, but at least from my point of view as difficult, very little media staying power.

I'll come back to the fact that nation building takes years, while almost none of the nation-building exercises I've been involved with in the last 20 years or so have the media stayed there after the first few years.  There is a difficulty of sustaining political commitment when that political commitment is so dependent on the prods and incentives of the media being present.

Second, I don't think you can comment on the media without also observing that there are two other phenomenons underway.  One is the striking shift of where people in failed states get their news from, from the old view that they got it from the BBC or CNN, to the new world where they get it either from the Internet or from local/regional media.  This is most strikingly demonstrated by the role of both the Internet and Al-Jazeera in the case of Iraq.  But it's a much broader phenomenon with little anticipated or understood results.  What it essentially means is that the State Department spokesman in Washington or the Secretary General spokesman in New York can make what we believe are important announcements on events and find that the news cycle in the region and the way information and the interpretation of events is being dispersed in the region bears utterly no relationship to the news as we see it from our own briefings and from what we read in the U.S. media.

Let me just give one example of that, one that caught me by surprise just over the last weekend, and I give it only because of its currency, and that is the story of U.S. and U.K. treatment of prisoners in Iraq.

I first knew about it when I read about it in the New York Times.  My colleagues from my Arab Bureau were deeply critical of the Secretary General and myself for not having condemned it weeks ago.  I said, "But, you know, I only read about in the New York Times today," completely unaware as a non-Arabic speaker that these allegations had not only been, you know, covered heavily in the regional media--minus photographs, of course--but had already been the subject of much commentary by human rights organizations in the media.

So the story as we see it from New York or Washington can often be totally different to the story as it's being played out amongst the citizens of these failed states on the ground.  So it's not just that there's new channels of media that I think we've not fully taken account of.  It's that the regional or national perspective on the news has, if anything, in this rather polarized post-September 11th world, the editorial slant or differences have sharpened not diminished.  So in what we glibly call a world of global media, all of us are actually reading more different media than ever before.

Now, having said that, let me very quickly suggest a series of nation-building lessons that we have drawn from the experience of what seems to us now as an organization almost, you know, over several decades of experience--because, you know, long before the ones we're now currently engaged in came the Somalias, the Mozambiques, Haiti several times around before this current time, the Balkans, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone--the list is very long.  And I should observe that Julia Taft, whom many of you know, who runs UNDP's Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Recovery, has at any point 30 to 50 countries in what she considers her rehabilitation ward, where Dr. Taft and friends are providing all kinds of services, from strengthening democratic institutions, to establishing rule of law, to running demobilization and reintegration programs, to basics like small arms collection and de-mining.  We have 30 to 50 countries at any one time where we're running these kinds of activities.  So I think we have at this point quite a repertoire of experience.

Lesson one:  Democratic governance isn't a short-term project.  From our accumulated experience--for those of you who look at this through the lens of Iraq, what I'm about to say isn't terribly good news--it takes at least five to seven years to establish a sustainable democracy, and our experience of Somalia or Haiti, where we aborted the process early, is you quite quickly get them back in Dr. Taft's rehabilitation ward.

Second, we have a tremendous difficulty in shifting from short-term humanitarian approaches to really longer-term government institution building, really getting beyond often the once-off holding of an election to building a real democratic system of culture, accountability, respect for human rights, respect for minority rights.  All of this is a long-term process, and the first elections are only one milestone and not the moment to declare victory and leave in terms of these efforts.

And I think Jim Dobbin's Rand study on this is absolutely excellent in terms of pointing out the need for staying power in these operations.  And, again, you know, I would just add that, you know, when we say staying power, it doesn't need to be in the current model of Iraq.  What we mean by staying power is John Negroponte and a supportive embassy or the UN, in partnership with the U.S., providing long-term support to an Iraqi government.  So this is not about who's in charge.  It's about staying there to support and invest in these processes until they are established beyond the point of no return.

Lesson two is this one kind of security to the citizens of a nation state, of a failed state, that matters much more than the kinds of security that we often have in mind, and that's personal security.  For them, policemen are usually much more important than peacekeepers.  Almost always the streets of a failed state are the least safe place to be.  It's not formal battlefronts where the internal civil war is waging.  It's the breakdown of basic law and order on the streets, and this is the most critical thing to get right in terms of turning people's minds and incentive systems from war to peace.

And critical it is, because we've got to recognize that 50 percent of all peace agreements fail within the first three years.  So getting some of these first building blocks in place is key.  So for us, the security sector is very much police, judiciary, prisons and corrections regimes and justice systems which need very, very quick attention, as does demobilization and reintegration, something that often funding for is desperately slow in the early months where you have militias and demobilized or semi-demobilized armies wandering around making a living off civilian populations, guns still in hand.  Moving effectively on that is that is absolutely critical.

Lesson three is that, quite contrary to what many think about the UN, we absolutely do not believe that UN political leadership in an operation need be synonymous with unified command and control in the military side of things.  We have understood the dangers of confusion in terms of command and control.  We saw what happened in the Balkans when military commanders had to wait for a second UN trigger to be pulled.  We've seen what happens when--whether it was the Australians at the beginning in East Timor or the United States today in Iraq or the U.K. in Sierra Leone or the French in Cote d'Ivoire or the initial force in Haiti today, we have recognized when countries put their own troops at risk, there must also be a responsibility--they must be allowed responsibility for military decisionmaking.

So the view that we expect to second-guess every operational military decision in operations in which we are partners is one which flies in the face of experience.  And, similarly, we believe when there is a suitably organized way of working together--and let me be clear, in later stages when you get a full blue helmets operation, we do expect such control.  But more and more there is a long hybrid period at the beginning where there is a country tasked with the military responsibility under a UN Security Council resolution which leaves the political responsibility elsewhere.

But let me just say that where you get these mixed hybrids, it's a bargain for the U.S.  Kosovo, which certainly has its own problems, nevertheless is one where the U.S. has paid less than a quarter of reconstruction costs, fielded a small minority of the peacekeeping forces, and yet had the kind of control over that operation, shared with its European partners, that it wanted.  And there are many other examples as well.

Lesson four is--and I sense I've touched on this--that the first six months after a cease-fire constitute the really critical phase for putting the grassroots of nation building in place, and they are the phase where usually these operations, be they bilateral U.S. ones or multinational ones, are least well funded.  The humanitarian is running down.  The long-term reconstruction funding is not in the place.  There's a gap, which is often the critical moment at which peace fails because we're not decisively able to create a peace dividend and momentum.

The fifth lesson, private sector, hard to establish in these early stages when there's still instability in the early stages of peace, but absolutely indispensable.  It is the counterpart to democracy as vital to harness the economic energy of people emerging from conflict.  There is no successful example of modern nation building around anything other than a vibrant private sector economy.

And let me just cite Mozambique as an example of a country which emerged from conflict still with its socialist doctrine in place.  It has made a splendid job of burning all of that up, of tackling security and DDR early on, but of using private sector development to really consolidate the peace.

Let me just very quickly close by just offering two observations, really, or three, about the future.

First is that the UN can't do this without the U.S., but I'm going to modestly suggest--or immodestly suggest--that the U.S. can't do it without the UN; that the partnership is absolutely indispensable, not least because it needs the political authority of the world's leading power, but it often needs the trust and neutrality of the UN to undertake these difficult, difficult, sensitive tasks of building the new institutions in a way that all parties to a conflict trust; that all parties to the conflict believe that we as the intermediary have only one agenda in our mind, which is their country's and not others.  And this partnership is critical for that reason, and it's critical for a second reason.

With such a high propensity to fail in terms of nation building, learning from the successes or the failures, building improved models of success for the future is critical.  The U.S. is in most but not all of these nation-building exercises.  It brings a particular perspective to them.  The need for a multilateral home for understanding best practices and building agreed ways of tackling these problems in the future is absolutely critical.

My final, final observation:  Costs.  Nation building is getting horridly expensive:  both the peace-building component of it and then the reconstruction activities that follow.  Let me just give you a couple of figures to give you a sense of this.

On peace building, the Government of Japan increased its development support to Africa this year so that it will be spending through bilateral and multilateral channels in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa a billion dollars a year.  Its estimate of what will be required of it under assessed contributions from the UN for peacekeeping operations in Africa is $900 million a year.

If you take Sierra Leone, we successfully secured peace with a $5 billion peacekeeping operation during which we spent $500 million on assistance and reconstruction.

In Afghanistan, so far development spending has been running at the order of $2.5 billion a year, approximately.  Peacekeeping is running at the order of $11 billion a year.

The disproportionate costs of just the peacekeeping effort, before you get to the very major down-the-road reconstruction costs, are really striking.  And, you know, this raises some real challenges about how to keep focused on reconstruction, keep focused on conflict prevention, to recognize that peacekeeping is the ultimate high-cost surgical intervention when preventive health care or rehabilitative health care has failed.  And so we really need to both work on the conflict prevention side together, but then when we do emerge from peacekeeping into reconstruction, make sure it succeeds, because the price of putting the patient back under the surgeon's knife for another peacekeeping operation is hugely expensive.

Thank you.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Thank you very much, Mark.

I'll now turn the floor over to Ambassador Pearson.

AMBASSADOR PEARSON:  Joshua, thank you very much, and thank you, Mark, for the opportunity to have this cosponsored symposium today, and I am delighted to be a participant.

I also, of course, want to acknowledge the excellent work of UNDP and many, many countries.  As Ambassador to Turkey over the last three years--I came home last summer--I can say that the program in Turkey is certainly exemplary, and the work we did in the run-up to Iraq was one of very, very good and close cooperation.

I would like to talk to you a bit today, if I can, about the practitioner's view, not so much about U.S.-UN relations but perhaps experience and, therefore, what the State Department, Secretary Powell, is working to do in the current circumstances.

First of all, in my 28 years of experience in the Foreign Service, I have seen and all of you who have spent that time looking at U.S. relations have seen crises in a wide variety of areas--Central America, Somalia, Haiti for my third time, Middle East always, South Africa, West Africa.  I was a China  (?)  .  I went to China when the relationship was really just beginning in the early '80s.  We've seen the financial crises in the Pacific, among the Pacific states, Timor, and in my tours at NATO, of course, the Balkans, Central Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union.  So, actually, crises and response to crises are our business.  They are not an exception to our business.

In all of that time, the general pattern has been to have the event occur, and then we start thinking about how to respond to it.  We find the personnel.  We find the resources.  We organize the networks.  We begin to see how to respond.  And there has always been a lag time.

However, I would say that over that 25-year period, the success rate has been fairly high.  And I remember the cynicism with which the U.S. was greeted as we first began to try to work something in the Balkans in the early '90s.  Some of my friends gave me stacks of books about how far back the problem went, even to imperial Roman history, with the supposition that, therefore, you are not going to really be able to do much about it and, besides, you're naive anyway.

The result of all this, however, has really proved that American will, resources, diplomatic, military, and economic applied against problems across an entire spectrum of difficulties over a long period of time has proven to be remarkably successful.  And I think that it's very important to keep that as a background fact as we continue this discussion.  But the, if you want to call it, luxury we had to allow the event to take place and then to begin to decide how to react to it is not a luxury we have anymore.

When I came back from Turkey and I started talking to people here in Washington and, frankly, around the country, I thought that I would have some difficulty with the thesis I was going to put forward, which is we have to find a way to react much more quickly.  And, in fact, I would say there is a broad consensus everywhere I've been that we need to be able to react much more quickly.  So let me describe what we're doing.

Secretary Powell in his testimony before committees this spring has talked about a readiness reserve.  A typical Foreign Service officer will have served in at least two geographic bureaus after 10 or 12 years of experience in the service.  And if you happen to be, let's say, a Latin American and a Russian specialist and you're in Latin America today and something goes wrong in Russian-speaking countries, you are our active reserve for that country.  Instead of having trained people serially, as we did over past careers--I was a Chinese language officer in the early '80s--we would keep people trained comprehensively through their careers.  But once you've invested, as you know, it's not hard to keep the investment up-to-date, but if you let it languish, you've lost the entire investment.

So we keep people's language skills, area of expertise, intelligence access, up to a workable level over the entire career in all of the competencies that a Foreign Service officer and specialist acquires, and that makes it possible for that person to be available in at least two places, depending on the priorities.  I think that would magnify our impact on execution of policy without having to engender a lot of additional expense.

We are lucky enough, I would have to say, to be able to think about that because in the last three years, Secretary Powell has, with the President's very strong support and the support of the Congress, been able to bring in enough new officers that we have about a 10-percent plus-up in our Foreign Service.  That allows us to do three things we could never do before.  We can send people to places where positions are hard to fill; we've sent more of these young people, for example, to Africa over the last three years than we were ever able to do before.  We have a training float now which allows us to take people out of the circuit and take them into longer-term training.  And we have a surge capacity we did not have before.

If you take that as a resource, there are two other factors that I would touch on.  One is what I would call a horizontal factor which has been building for a long, long time, and that is simply global demographics.  According to one NGO, if you take the portion of the world's population that has gone through the democratic economic transition, probably, roughly speaking, you could say between a quarter to a third of the world's population.

There's probably a quarter to a third of the world's population that is not yet capable of going through that transition, and there is a quarter to a third, at least, that is in play.  Since I came from Turkey, I can certainly say that countries like Turkey and Mexico and Indonesia and India--and all of us could think of more--are in that zone where they have given up the traditional way of doing things, are looking to join the top club, but are most at risk because they are in the most vulnerable stage of their transition.  And for U.S. interests, it seems to me that it is vital that we have a diplomatic service that is able to help those countries and other countries make that transition as profitably as possible.

The vertical, if you will, is 9/11.  9/11 took everything that existed and put it into a new light.  Americans were much more willing to see armed forces used overseas, they were much more willing to absorb casualties, they were much more appreciative of what was at stake than they had been before.  And I think that that reality will color our impressions for a long, long time, as it should, in fact, and that that, too, will make it possible for us to emphasize the ability to react.

One of the things we're thinking about and we're still working on--so this is simply to describe a work in progress--is to develop a capacity by which we could have a center for the coordination of reconstruction and stabilization efforts within the executive branch, headed by a proper person who would be able to liaise with all of the players and perform three functions:

One, to monitor crises that may be developing.  This is not rocket science, since I think if we ask you in this room to give us a list, we'd probably all more or less agree.

Secondly, to game, to exercise, and to train in anticipation of the crisis coming to fruition, if you will.

And, thirdly, to locate and organize the personnel who would be responsive to the crisis.

We've gone out in the department and we've borrowed some software from NASA.  They have the same basic mission we do in a different context.  They're global and they have to get the right people to the right place tomorrow.  We're going to ask our people to provide additional details about their pre-employment experience, their language abilities, their experience with NGOs, their experience with the UN, and we're going to be able then, by running this software in a couple of hours, to turn out everybody who ever had anything to do with Belize or Slovenia or any other spot we want to identify in the world.  And then we can take that group and begin to work with them in advance of a crisis arriving.

Of course, we are not going to predict every crisis.  That's the nature of crises.  You can't predict every crisis.  But we will be able to cover some of them, and we will be able to create a mechanism that anticipates a bit, and then this tool will be available to a Secretary of State, a President for response in a given crisis, we hope much more quickly than we have been able to do in the past.  So that's our piece of it.  And it's based on a final point which I think is important just to remember and which is obvious to all of you.

The U.S. cannot--let me put it this way:  Whether we act or not has significant consequences.  If we act, that has consequences.  If we don't act, that has consequences.  So the imperative for us is to be able to more intelligently decide how to prepare in advance, how to have a tool that allows a President and a Secretary of State to respond on the civilian side more rapidly than we have been able to do before, and how to make that produce more effective results.

Now, in this scheme, which is quite flexible, there is, of course, ample room--and there should be--for cooperation with the UN, with the UN organizations, with international organizations of any relevance, if that is appropriate in the circumstance.  For our purposes in the State Department, it will be tailored so that we can react to something at the lower end of the spectrum without a military component and be able to react as well to the upper end of the spectrum where there would be a military component.

So that, I think, is a step in the right direction.  It also for us takes advantage of the fact that we have a Foreign Service that is being recruited at a higher level of capability and with a greater obligation on us to train them to that level.

One-third of our service is new since 1998.  This means that we are going to be able--we are going to have to and we are also going to be able to develop new talents, new skills, and new capabilities to face the challenges we have ahead.

Thank you very much, Joshua.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Thank you, Bob, for those interesting comments.

Finally, Larry?

MR. DIAMOND:  Well, I was asked to speak about these issues in terms of the lessons learned from Iraq, and I see, as we come to this point in the conversation, it has started raining very heavily outside.  It's very gray.  I have an air conditioner bearing down on me, and I'm freezing.  And I don't know if this is a metaphor for what's about to come.

I'm going to try very hard not to be too negative.  It is hard to do because we have slid very badly in the last three months since I first visited Iraq at the beginning of the year, and I think we're in a very critical situation now.  I'm mainly not going to talk about the details.  I'm going to try to draw out some lessons.

But in response to what's been said, let me make a couple of general points, and then I'll go directly to my lessons.

First is, you know, if you read the literature on peace building, peace implementation--because it's really in these circumstances what we're talking about.  In fact, I think the Department of Peacekeeping Operations may even need to be renamed, because in the immediate context of a conflict, post-conflict, before you can keep the peace, you have to make the peace.  And before you can, you know, have a state, you have to meet the fundamental vabarian(ph) condition for a state.  And that is that it has a monopoly over the means of ions.

There is a reason why, if you look back through the history of the modern nation state, most of them got formed through warfare and massive, even decades- or centuries-long, sustained violence.  You really have to go back to Hobbes to understand what's at stake here.  And I agree with virtually everything Mark said.  I'm a big admirer of the UNDP and the work particularly that Mark has done with it.  But it isn't only about personal security.  You're absolutely right in what you said, but personal security derives in part from a larger context.  And if we don't get the larger context of security right, you can't get the personal security right.  You can get the larger context right and have endemic violence of a decentralized criminal nature.  But the reverse cannot be true.

Secondly, on an institutional front, I just want to say by way of introduction that I am a big admirer of what Secretary Powell has been doing over the last three and a half years to rebuild a Foreign Service that has been decimated in resources and size.  And we're going to need a lot of resources, a lot of institutional capacity, a lot of experience and so on.

I think the next place to start, if I may say so, or the next step in terms of rebuilding and recovery, would be to re-create the United States Information Agency, whose closure I think institutionally has been one of the biggest disasters for the United States of my professional lifetime.

Now, let me share with you a few key lessons, which will reiterate two themes that I just articulated, and offer a few others.

First of all, really, you know, when Carville said in 1991, "It's the economy, Stupid," I'd say the initial statement that needs to be made about these post-conflict situations is, "It is security, Stupid."  If you don't get that right, nothing else can work.  You can get the context right and fail in the political institutional design, fail in terms of providing effective policing and personal security, fail in terms of economic reconstruction or the design of the economy, but you can't fail on the security front and succeed on anything else.

This is not an area where the UN now has--and I'm sure Mark will agree with me--the capacity in terms of its available resources for peacekeeping or peace implementation that can be called upon on anything like the scale that is needed globally, not only for Iraq but for all sorts of other cases.  And if you spend any time in Iraq, I will say as well, in all candor, one of the things that inevitably confronts one is the utter inadequacy of the size of the international, if I can put it this way, peace implementation force.

I think personally that we needed pretty much in the aftermath of the conflict about twice as many troops as we have ever had at any point in time since the end of the conflict.  And one of the lessons you learn from reading the literature on peace implementation--and I would recommend to you, for example, a superb edited volume by Stephen Steadman, who is now the staff director for the UN panel on high-level threats to collective security, Elizabeth Cousins, and Donald Rothschild that was published by Len Reiner(ph) a year or two ago.  You know, if you don't have adequate force relative to the population--and this comes out from the Rand study as well--it's very hard to get the security situation right.  And the Rand study recommended 20 peacekeepers to 1,000 population.  That would have implied half a million troops for Iraq.  I think half of that could have worked, but not 130,000 or 150,000.

Why do we need adequate security?  Well, first of all, there are people out there--and we know who they are in many circumstances, and we know who they are in Iraq--who don't want peace, certainly don't want democracy, and don't want anything like the kind of political order that the civilized world would like to see.

Now, some of these people straddle the fence, and you can buy them off and induce them to come in from the field of violence into a peaceful political game with a comprehensive, well-conceived, well-funded, politically led DDR--that is, disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration--campaign or strategy of which Mark Malloch Brown has already spoken.  And it took us a long time, but we actually started negotiating that DDR effort in Iraq a few months ago.

But if you don't have enough force to do two other things, no DDR effort, no matter how well funded, no matter how well conceived politically, no matter how alluring the financial incentives, is going to work.

You have to have enough force so that the forces who aren't certain that they really want to play the peaceful political game know that the alternative is waiting out there for them, which is to be crushed by force.  And you have to have enough force so that the spoilers who are never going to play the peaceful political game will be crushed by force.

And let me tell you, without question, Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army are one such irretrievable spoiling force in Iraq that should have been confronted with the full force of the law--because we had arrest warrants for Sadr and 11 of his top deputies, sealed for at least eight months before this crisis exploded about a month ago.  We should have and could have, I think at reasonable cost, if we'd acted early and with overwhelming force, disabled this spoiling force a long time ago.  And I think many of you know the literature on spoilers.  You bring in everybody else.  You isolate them, you de-legitimate them, and you crush them.  That takes a certain amount of force.

And then you can induce the other private armed forces--in the case of Iraq, the other militias--to come in and play the political game because the military threats to them have been demobilized.

So I will say finally about force, in terms of an analytical approach, you need enough force to protect the physical reconstruction of the country.  And if you don't get the physical reconstruction going, the electricity re-working, the water re-working, the schools rebuilt, the markets opening, the traffic being able to move on the road, and the economy doesn't rebound, then you can't -- [tape ends].

-- get the progress on the political reconstruction.  Everything's linked.  It is to some extent a chicken-and-egg problem.  But I as a political scientist who started with democracy and then, you know, looked into the jaws of the situation, have really been impressed with the Hobbesian lesson of where to begin.

Now, in terms of practical lessons, here's where I come out.  Number one, as I said, the UN now does not have anything close to the ability to put together from its potential for troop mobilization from individual country contributors for peace implementation anything like the size, sophistication, and robustness--and I'm going to come back to robustness in a minute--of force that was needed to forge and maintain peace in Iraq and I think that will be needed in some, for the variety of other post-conflict missions we will confront in the future.

Until and unless the UN can mobilize that degree and robustness--we're not just talking about numbers of troops--of force, the job will inevitably be left to big international powers, such as the U.S. globally, or maybe Australia acting in Southeast Asia, or a coalition of the willing or NATO, or something like that.  And even if it does mobilize it, when you look at lift capacity, when you look at military command, that's still probably going to have to come from the U.S. and other major powers.

Third, it would be better for international stability and legitimacy, I think, and the long-term viability of peace implementation missions if these were authorized by the UN Security Council, funded through a form of collective mechanisms of the UN, and waged under UN auspices.  But this isn't always possible.

If it is going to be possible more often, I think we're going to need a couple of things:  number one, a much larger constellation of forces.  My understanding is that there's something like 60,000, 70,000 UN peacekeeping forces available to be drawn on in the contributing--from the contributing countries, and we know who generally they are.  I think we need to increase that potential reserve by a factor of several times, maybe up to a quarter of a million or 300,000 total, who sit in the armed forces of different nations but are trained, and often trained together across national lines, equipped, having an esprit de corps and a logic, arms and equipment, so on and so forth, so they represent a kind of stand-by capacity.  And we need in this stand-by capacity, following on what Mark said and what we've seen on the ground in Iraq, a much, much large component of military police, carbineri, you know, sort of muscular policing and security forces.

And the forces that come to constitute this much larger international, integrated reserve for peace implementation missions must have more robust rules of engagement.  I can tell you, I was very glad that the Spanish troops were there, that the Polish troops were there, that we had a multinational division in the south-central region of Iraq politically.  But on the ground, they weren't of much use because their rules of engagement prevented them from taking the kinds of actions that were necessary to face down spoilers.  And if we don't face down spoilers with the right rules of engagement, forceful rules of engagement, and do it early in the timing of these conflicts, we won't solve the security problem.

A few other lessons more briefly.

Number two, no one likes occupation in any form, but not all occupations are equal in their offensiveness to national sensitivities.  And here again I agree with Mark in this sense, and we've seen it very frontally in Iraq:  They don't trust us.  They just don't trust us.  We may think, the administration may think we're there to end a terribly tyranny, to protect human rights, find weapons of mass destruction, but that issue I think is largely by the wayside.  There are other issues now.  But they don't even believe it now.  Most Iraqis think we have a hidden agenda, that we want permanent military bases and permanent control over Iraqi oil.  Personally, I think we should announce that we have no intention of seeking any permanent military bases on Iraqi soil.  That would help.

But, nevertheless, whatever else the UN may be criticized for and whatever other suspicions people may have of the UN, outside of Montana and a few other places, most people in the world don't think that the UN is seeking permanent military bases.  So it's got some potential to be a more neutral intervenor with less suspicion around it than the United States, and I think we need to exploit that in terms of who's out front in managing the political aspects of the post-transition situation.

Now, in fact, Sergio de Mello and Ambassador Paul Bremer worked quite closely with one another.  De Mello's loss was a horrible loss for us, for all of us, for Iraq.  And I think there's a lesson from that I'm going to come to in a minute.  But, still, I think we could have done more to elevate de Mello's role to a full partnership with the United States and with Ambassador Bremer rather than having it be in a subsidiary role.  And as Mark has mentioned, the UN has a tremendous amount of technical expertise in post-conflict reconstruction and, I might add, post-conflict institutional design, constitution making, and electoral preparation as Corinna Perelli's team signifies--she being the head of the UN electoral unit.

The third lesson, drawing from the terrible tragedy of August 19th--and I think it's one that the UN understands acutely now--is that the rules have changed after the August 19th bombing.  The blue helmets, the blue flags, the blue insignias on the cars, which used to be seen as a shield, are now a bull's eye in the eyes of many terrorists.  And the UN is going to have to be much more vigorous and proactive about its own security in the future with the kinds of distance that implies, the kinds of setbacks that implies, the kinds of protection it implies, if it's going to be effective in these situations in the future, because the spoilers want to drive the UN out.  And if they think they can do it with a car bomb or by killing a few UN officials well placed, they'll do it.

Lesson four is that experience and technical expertise do matter greatly, both on the UN side, on the U.S. side, and on every other side.  On the UN side, let me tell you what I have heard--because I'm not an expert in this--from observers of the United Nations who are very sympathetic to it.  They worry that the UN relies too much on seniority to elevate people in their careers.  And we all know what happens when people are promoted too much simply by means of seniority without the ability to evaluate for performance and to put really capable younger people on a fast track to senior leadership.  And they think that more needs to be done to build a UN cadre of elite and experienced experts in nation building below the level of the de Mellos and Lakhdar Brahimis.

On the U.S. side, I have come to believe very strongly in response to some of the issues that you posed, Ambassador Pearson, that the type of institutional arrangement we need must lie in a Cabinet-level department, headed by a Secretary for International Development and Reconstruction.  And I think the seed of that Cabinet-level department is very obviously the U.S. Agency for International Development.  That's where the largest share of expertise is.  And I think if we're going to be a serious player on this front for the long run, we must have a Cabinet-level department, and I think it should be enlarged from USAID as the core.

Finally, obviously--and this goes beyond the U.S. and the UN--we really are all in this together.  The consequences of failed states and failing states with their spillover effects regionally and internationally affect everybody, and that's why Japan, which other than North Korea is, you know, not in a terribly unstable region at the moment, is sending resources far and wide.  We need more troops and we need more resources by a factor, in my opinion, of several times.  And everybody is going to have to step up to the plate in terms of the established nations of the world.  And I hope in stepping up to the plate the European countries, Japan, Korea, and others will realize that the United States--maybe it should be doing more at the United Nations, but it's already bearing a lot of burdens on a bilateral basis that go beyond what most countries are doing.  So the proportionate increase in what needs to be done to support United Nations efforts might be higher with some other actors.  But I think if the American public understands how important a more robust and integrated, UN-coordinated peace implementation, international reserve is and that the alternative to that is that the inevitable increase in the United States Army that is going to come is going to have to be even much larger than will otherwise be coming, they will be willing to--and, you know, if they have confidence in its leadership and coordination with the U.S., I think they will be willing to support, if the case is made effectively from our political leadership, a much larger level of United States funding for UN-led international peace implementation.

Thank you.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Thank you, Larry.

Now we have an opportunity for comments and questions.  Comments are okay as long as they are brief.  Please, when I call on you, wait for the mike to get to you and then begin by introducing yourself.  Yes, this lady in the back?

MS. LUCAS:  Hi.  My name is Sara Lucas from the Center for Global Development.  Thank you all.  This has been extraordinarily interesting.

My question is along the lines of prevention.  You have all spoken a lot about the importance of nation building in post-conflict situations and rapid response to crisis situations.  But I've heard very little, with the exception of some of Mark Malloch Brown's ending comments, about preventing state failure.  And what do we need to do to invest in institution building, economic, social, political development, in many, many weak states around the world so we can avoid state failure and crisis?  It is much cheaper, dollar-wise and life-wise, to do so.

I just wanted to alert you all to the fact that the Center for Global Development has a Commission on Weak States and National Security.  We'll be launching the commission report in June, and we try and take on this combination of rapid response to current crisis situations and prevention of future state failure.  And I was actually happy to hear Larry Diamond endorse the idea of a Cabinet-level position for development because that's something--

MR. MURAVCHIK:  We don't have much time for questions, so--

MS. LUCAS:  --that we endorse as well.  Thanks.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Why don't we answer these as we go.

MR. MALLOCH BROWN:  You're absolutely right.  Prevention is a lot cheaper and a lot more effective where it works.  And the problem is it's hard to have good statistics on where it's worked because you're never quite sure when your interventions are being critical in preempting conflict.

But I think we're seeing more and more a battery of policies which can both prevent conflict and other policies which need to be corrected so that they don't increase conflict.  The "do no evil" law or "do no harm" law of public policy is critical, I mean, you know, just very obvious things.  When you have economic strategies, disadvantaged groups who are already feeling marginalized and threatened further, which fail to finance public service provision to them, for example, tends to generate conflict, or at least provide a greater incentive.

So I think we're getting, beginning to get a real handle on the kind of things which we weak states bumping along just above the lapse into conflict need to do to improve the odds of staying on the right side of that line, and I look at that as a huge area for our work and for trying to improve our understanding of the causes of conflict that we can effectively address and redress.

AMBASSADOR PEARSON:  I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear, but the idea that I put forward is specifically designed to be able to prevent, because it would be flexible enough to react at very early stages of difficulties and add additional resources to the U.S. Government and other international agencies' ability to respond, so specifically for that reason, that's why we've been thinking about this.

Secondly--and I'll say this so that Larry can have a good point to respond to--I really think we need less bureaucracy about how we do things and more emphasis on what works.  And to create another Cabinet level with another set of federal employees to look at the same problems that we're struggling with today, I would submit, is going to be, frankly, a waste of resources.  What we need to do is to organize more effectively what we now all know how to do.  And so at least for your benefit in making your temperature rise and for Larry's benefit in responding, that's my position, personal position on that point.

MR. DIAMOND:  Well, three points very briefly.

First of all, I think if you created a Cabinet-level department, it wouldn't necessarily have to be much larger than USAID is now, but that department would have a lot more status, authority, expertise, and I think it could organize things better and more effectively.  I do think we need more resources for international development, and I think if we had a Cabinet-level Secretary, he or she could be a more effective advocate for it.  We'll probably find a host of other arguments in the report.

On prevention, I just want to say two things.

Number one, there's no state that is weak or failing that doesn't have bad governance.  I mean, I just defy anybody to show me one.  And if you don't solve the problem of bad governance, you won't solve this problem in the long run of weak and failing states.  So the ultimate antidote, it seems to me, is an effective combination of strategies, which involves development assistance, diplomatic pressure, coordination in a variety of ways, to reform badly governed states, to enable them to generate public goods and, therefore, development rather than private goods corruptly acquired for themselves, their cronies, their families and so on.

The other thing is, among the things--and I think this is a very exciting idea you have articulated about the capacity for more flexible deployment in crisis situations of career experts from the State Department and maybe elsewhere.  But, in addition, in crises sometimes you need to put boots on the ground before you get to the ultimate point of state collapse or humanitarian disaster.  I mean, we all know that the Rwandan genocide could have been stopped at an early point with a moderate amount of force, effectively applied.  And there are instances where basically there are thugs who are getting ready to seize power or there are thugs who are in power.  And it's a Hobbesian story again.  You need superior force to repel them or constrain them.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Over here.

MR. JOHNSON:  Gordon Johnson, retired, Center for Privatization, a businessman.  Larry Diamond said that one of the misunderstandings about us in that part of the world is they think we're there to control the oil.  Secretary Powell a year and a half ago said Iraq's oil belongs to Iraq's people.  We have said nothing since then.

Two questions.  Why are we so silent about the oil?  And doesn't oil make any country a whole new level of risk?  In other words, in the Middle East you have a great surplus of oil--which represents money.  It isn't the oil.  It's the money it represents, which is being used for bad purposes, whether it's educating children to hate instead of to make a living, or whether it's used for military, palaces, et cetera.  Why are we so reluctant to do anything about the oil?  Why haven't we declared an oil dividend?  Why isn't the CPA transparent about the oil situation today?  We saw it happen with the UN, and all the CPA says is we put in this much money a week, every week, and that's all the detail we get.  There's no transparency for us, and if there's no transparency, you'll never keep them honest.  And a country with oil is independently wealthy, and that's bad.

AMBASSADOR PEARSON:  I would just say that I--you know, I hear your frustration.  There has been no deviation whatsoever in the policy we had, and I heard myself, I would have to say, any number of times a repetition of the policy that the oil belongs to the Iraqi people.  Larry can speak to this perhaps better than I can.  The oil production in Iraq now is higher than it was in the pre-war period, and that's one of the objectives of CPA, to keep on producing that oil.  But it is for the Iraqi people.

And I suppose the right answer to your question might be that once the Iraqis enjoy sovereignty and they can exercise their judgment on this question, then it's up to them to say what they want to do with their oil.  And that would be our answer.

MR. DIAMOND:  I think that's right.  Just two quick points.

Number one, I think we've been very reluctant to do anything structurally to the oil industry, privatization or whatever, for fear that it would be misinterpreted and reinforce these suspicions.  So I think that's been a sincere concern.

The second thing is what I think we should be doing is saying, look, this is your national asset to Iraqis, you're going to have to decide once you have an elected and legitimate government.  But let's begin to talk about what some of the structural possibilities are.  Let's begin to review country experiences around the world, because we know that what you're saying is true.  And I think we should be helping now to develop thinking in Iraq about alternatives, and the alternative that I think Iraq should be seriously thinking about is a transparent oil trust fund into which all the sales go, which has World Bank, IMF, some kind of UN or international--maybe not UN given the experience with oil, but some kind of international participation and that's fully transparent.  So at least on the receipt side of the oil industry, all Iraqis know where the money has gone.

But then you've got to worry about accountability on the expenditure side as well, where it's also frequently stolen, and that's a whole other story.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Here at this table.

MS.           :  Hilda   (?)    .  Just two quick questions.

Just recently, when  (?)   was here in Washington and talking about the lessons from Rwanda, he was talking about the mistake of pushing too early for elections because it burdens too much in a transformation society.  I would like to hear your comments on that about this danger.

And just very short to Larry Diamond, from your experiences in Iraq, do you have also some comments not only about the size of the force needed but also of the capacities of the armed forces, the U.S. armed forces, maybe the training they need for this kind of work.

Thanks.

MR. MALLOCH BROWN:  On the Rwanda point, I mean, I absolutely--I mean, Lakhdar Brahimi, a brilliant negotiator who's steeped in decades of experience in this, is always nervous about pressing too soon for elections.  That's why he went the Loya Jirga route in Afghanistan, because unless you've got a basic consensus and comfort level amongst different religious and ethnic groups, you know, an electoral exercise where some groups know themselves to be outnumbered, you know, can be a recipe for violent breakdown.

So you need to get that consensus.  You need to get an understanding that minority rights are going to be fully respected and enshrined before you move.

But, on the other hand, you know, if the delays begin to reflect the perception of other agendas for delay, a fear of letting, for example, the Shia majority prevail, then you get into other difficulties.  And so, you know, I think to the extent we're allowed a view on this, we do believe that June would have been too soon in Iraq, but anything later than the six-month postponement that was agreed would really risk a violent backlash.

So I think, you know, we're not trapped into a timetable in Iraq which will be hard to move from.

MR. DIAMOND:  I agree with everything Mark said.  I think it reflects a very sensible balance.

I do think that we're going to have a heck of a time meeting the deadline of January 31st, particularly if we don't get security under control very rapidly.  But if Iraqis see and if Ayatollah Sistani sees visible, sincere institutional progress toward getting those elections up and running, then if we slip a month or two, I think the forces that are committed to seeing those elections happen soon will be understanding, but only if it's a sincere, you know, organizational delay and not suspicion of a politically motivated one.

In response to your second question, about total size, I don't know.  I think we're probably going to need a United States Army of probably 600,000 rather than closer to 500,000.  But one thing that's clear is we don't have nearly enough MPs.  Obviously, we need to train them better at certain things and direct them better at certain things.  But we don't have nearly enough.  And if you worry about the point that Mark made as one of his initial points, then having a greater capacity for policing on the street in the very immediate aftermath of conflict, and having a much better capacity for police training, which has been pretty close to a disaster in Iraq in its efficiency, are obvious priorities for the type of forces that we will need to be effective in the future and that the international community will need.

MR. CAMPBELL:  Ken(?) Campbell of Freedom House.  We've been talking about failed states, but we've also seen some real shortcomings in the multilateral institutions.  Perhaps to say "failure" would be too unkind, but clearly, there are shortcomings that need to be addressed.  And we have the world today talking about the importance of bringing the United Nations back into Iraq.  We have a presidential campaign, two candidates, both of them vying to see who can hand off the Iraq mess to the United Nations.  But nobody's talking about the kinds of changes that may be required in the United Nations to make it the sort of effective instrument that can deal with all the problems you've addressed.

I wonder perhaps, to make this a question, Ambassador Pearson, is there any thinking at the State Department or in the Bush administration today about what can be done--since we're about to offer this prize to the United Nations, what can be done to help the United Nations deal with it and to make sure the United Nations deals with it effectively?  We have a terrible rift among the countries of the transatlantic community that have the capacity to provide political energy and resources for this.  How are we going to deal with that?  And if we don't deal with it, aren't we creating expectations, again, in our own public and in the world that we're bound to disappoint?

AMBASSADOR PEARSON:  These are all, let me just say, personal observations.

One, utopian solutions don't work.

Two, I would say that the principal obligations, which I believe that the UN would broadly share, are that there has to be a political consensus at the beginning to go with the project.  You can't have political uncertainty between the participating countries and the UN organizations about the project.  And, secondly, I would say the UN has to be willing to stick it out.  And that's not a criticism of the UN, but it simply means that the players who go in have to be able to stay with the project, because every project has some very difficult moments.  And if you look back at every single crisis the U.S. has gone through, from Central America through Southeast Europe, it has taken some time to work out the ultimate solution and the going-in years have most often seen the most difficult challenges.

So those are my personal observations.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  We're now at the point where we've only got a few minutes, and we've got many more questions we can get to.  I'll try to call on a handful of questioners and give each of our panelists two minutes to answer whichever of the questions interest you most.  That's all I can do.

This gentleman here?  And also, to the questioners, please try to make your questions succinct.

MR. MASSEY:  Alex Massey from the Scotsman in Edinburgh.  If we're talking about U.S. and UN harmonizing their efforts and so on--and, clearly, I think most people here agree that the United States needs to make a greater commitment to nation building long term, et cetera, et cetera.  But doesn't the United Nations need to reform itself as well so that you don't have situations whereby countries such as Sudan elected to the Security Council, where you don't have a country like Zimbabwe on the UNHCR--Human Rights Commission, rather, and the UN needs to reform its internal processes to gain credibility and respect amongst the wider U.S. general public opinion in particular, but also internationally?

MR. MURAVCHIK:  This gentleman here?

MR. SAWYER:  John Sawyer, St. Louis Post Dispatch.  If you could address for a moment the lessons of Afghanistan.  We talked about Iraq.  Afghanistan is a place where the UN is already there.  It's been more of an international approach from the beginning, much fewer security forces present, and still a fairly shaky prospect for the elections which will happen later this year.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Right here?

MR. MITCHELL:  Gary Mitchell from the Mitchell Report.  The question is, given Mark Malloch Brown's observation that the first six months of post-conflict are the most critical, and Larry Diamond's observation that the last three months have been a disaster, which I suspect is charitable, what do we think is the true state of affairs in the reconstruction effort in Iraq today?

MR. HEIMAN:  Jerry Heiman (ph) at USAID.  Simply to follow Ken's question, but I'd like to address two questions that both Mark and Larry raised about force.  You talked about superior force, but I think the vabarian formula is legitimate [inaudible] legitimate force.  And the question I guess I have is:  To what extent, A, would the UN be considered a legitimate force by Iraqis?  Secondly, would a UN force be willing to do the kind of thing that you're talking about, Larry, go into Fallujah and go into Najaf and weed those folks out?  That was a very strong statement you made, and it depends, of course, on the willingness of the force to go in and the response to that action by local populations.  And it's the response that I think the U.S. is worried about, not whether we have the capacity to go in or not.  Would the UN be any better able to do that than the U.S. would?  And would, therefore, an alternative be, what some people have called for, an Islamic force of some kind that would have a greater legitimacy, possibly, than the UN?

MR. MORRIS:  Stephen Morris, Johns Hopkins.  I'd like to ask:  Are we talking about anything other than Iraq?  After all, before the U.S. went into Iraq, we know that it was against the concept of nation building.  And I'm sure that whoever is President next year will not be any more inclined towards further nation building in other parts of the world after experiencing nation building in Iraq.  So which countries are you possibly thinking of?

The second question:  Is there perhaps a problem now in the structure of the world given the fact that three European powers--Spain, France, and Germany--are opposed to relationships which tolerate the hegemonious position of the United States?  In other words, if there is to be UN harmony with the United States, isn't it going to require the diminution of an American role in any future UN-related nation building?

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Gentlemen, I'm afraid--I can give you each about two minutes to reply to not all of those questions.  Do as you will, and let's go in the same order.  Mark?

MR. MALLOCH BROWN:  Well, look, first, on UN reform--and let me mention that word you've all been very uncharacteristically too polite to say, Oil for Food.  You know, just about--after the Secretary General and his Deputy, the next person in the UN hierarchy, I am mortified by Oil for Food.  I will not be happy until Paul Volcker and his investigation have interviewed everybody they want to interview, read every document they want to read, release every document that there is public demand for, and we get a clean bill of health.

Just as all of you, if it was your domestic department of government or university department and these allegations were made, we all feel damaged by it.  And so to get that clean bill of health is absolutely critical.

That doesn't mean I assume my colleagues are guilty.  A number of journalists involved I know well.  They're good journalists.  I'm sure there's no smoke without fire.  But I just need--like anyone else, I want to see that thing cleared.  The sooner, the better, because in a sense Washington can't have it both ways.  You can't pour petrol on this and at the same time ask the UN to offer you a legitimate exit strategy for managing the politics of Iraq.  Either put us on the pedestal to do it, or cut the pedestal down and don't expect us to do it.  But work out what you want.

Second, I think the U.S. must be committed to nation building, but I also think it must be committed to UN building.  The total budget of the UN, global, worldwide, leaving out the World Bank and the IFIs, is smaller than the New York City Education Department and, as someone with kids in New York, I would argue better values than the New York City Education Department.  The total staff of the UN worldwide--and I'm counting the FAO--all of it lumped in--is smaller than those staffing the fantasy UN, Disney World and Disneyland.

So, you know, it has this view of being this huge global force, but there's not nearly enough of it to do the jobs we're asked to do--Afghanistan.  Political and economics work, security doesn't.  That's not our responsibility.

I think I better stop there.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Thank you.

Bob?

AMBASSADOR PEARSON:  A couple of things.

One is I think it's very interesting that we don't actually have the right rhetoric yet for what it is that we are trying to do when we say nation building.  The best examples we have of nation building, as such, go all the way back to World War II.  It is a leap of faith to think that one country or set of countries is actually going to build a nation somewhere else.  And I think we need a better set of words to describe what it is we actually want to do.  And I think that the use of the term causes confusion because it gives you an impression of scale and result that isn't appropriate to the discussions we have to have.  So I think frankly there is--one of the interesting facts about this entire subject is that we do not yet have the right vocabulary to talk about it.

Secondly, with respect to the question about Afghanistan, I don't pretend to be an expert.  I was in Kabul in January.  But if you look back at the history of crises, you will find that the first years of recovering from any crisis are the most difficult years, and they are the years when the media will focus on the risk as looming largest.  But in the history of the crises I pointed out to you, if you stay with it, the international community gets traction on the issue and begins to make some progress if they will stay with it--a theme that has been echoed here before.

Southeast Europe is in a much, much better position today than any of the doubters would ever have imagined in 1992.  And I think that's a really critical point to make.

My final point is I think that the discussion that I even heard today underlines the point that there is an international dialogue going on about how best to do that.  I don't think that Spain and France and Germany are simply determined to have at step one the diminution of American power.  What they want and what we want is an effective cooperation in the application of power on an international scale with them collectively and obviously with international organizations.  So I think that issue is a slight red herring.

Thank you.

MR. DIAMOND:  Well, I'll pick out just probably three issues to address.

First of all, I think the lessons of Afghanistan were actually well summarized by Mark, maybe too cryptically to be fully understood, if I'm understanding him correctly.  But I would just say at the risk of repeating myself, we don't have nearly enough troops in Afghanistan.  I mean, this would not have been that hard to do because the number of troops that would have been needed to face down the warlords in Afghanistan and pacify the country would have been much less than are needed for Iraq.  And I think it's tragic because Afghanistan really has good leadership right now, at least at the top, and a chance of making it.  And on the positive side of the lesson, I think Ambassador Brahimi has done a remarkable job in Afghanistan.  Someone should nominate this man for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now, you know, we're going to have to learn that lesson.  We either have to be serious about generating order so that the state can be reconstructed--because that's what I think we're talking about, Ambassador Pearson, not nation building.  First of all, these nations may be artificial, but they do already exist to some extent.  States need to be reconstructed.  They need to find their legs, recover their legitimacy and capacity.  And there's a period of time--the first six months are the most crucial--where they  need crutches to do so, and their administrative support, their economic support funds.  But a key component is the crutches to provide and maintain political order and eliminate powerful challenges to the new political order.

I think we could have done that in a forceful way in Afghanistan.  We actually still could.  It would be much easier to do it now, to confront the warlords in Afghanistan, I think, than to deal with the challenges that Jerry Heiman raised.  There, Jerry, I don't disagree with what you said.  I'm going to leave Fallujah aside for a moment and just say, yes, I think we need Shiites to confront other Shiites, mainly this thuggish force of Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf.  I think it's actually doable.  But, you know, there are many places where Sadr has taken control and represents a threat outside of Najaf.  And we have to simply declare that the man is, you know, a criminal--you know, there are criminal warrants for him.  His forces have committed unspeakable acts.  Other Iraqis, you know, consider him a terrible threat.  And some actors simply have to be put out of business.

On the question, finally, of the prospects in Iraq, given the fact that we're not in the first six months, this is a very difficult question, and I think that someone--was it you that asked it?  We should probably talk about it after we close.  I don't think that all is lost yet.  That's maybe the most that I can say.  But you do go down a road where, you know, there is a certain degree of path dependence, and things that were possible at one point in time are not so possible at a price that is readily borne or even imaginable at a later point in time.  I think we're more dependent now on political forces that are not very democratic, that are very unsavory in many respects, and that, frankly, in some cases I think are somewhat in the pocket of an odious regime in Iran.  And if we're going to be less dependent on those political forces, then we're going to have to invest even more militarily, politically, and economically than we may seem ready to.  And what worries me is the reports that I hear from many analysts that we actually don't have many more troops to put into Iraq.  That is a very, very sobering statement.  But even with that, I think, you know, working to construct a more legitimate Iraqi government which will take power by June 30th could provide the opportunity to mobilize more Iraqi resources to confront some of these problems, and that may provide a seed of hope.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Finally, a last word of thanks.  Thanks once again to David Yang and to UNDP for cosponsoring this with us.  Thanks to Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, for gracing us with her presence.  Thanks to the panelists for a very interesting discussion, and thank you all for coming.

There is wine and cheese out here, and maybe a chance to buttonhole the panelists for a last question if you let them get a drink in their hand first.