Well given the ideas of what an Islamic state might consist of are varied, I don’t know you can answer that.
In the end what do you mean by “really want”?
and who are these calling for the Islamic states? the college students? women? Professors and teachers? How is this “secular” school system controlled by a repressive regime with Saddams picture on every wall of the classrooms and hallways suppose to give an open view of world? I think the Iraqi Information Minister is a shining example of the Iraqi secular education system.
My mistake. Mosul demonstrations are mostly Anti-american rather than pro-islamic state. Still you have to admit their veracity are suspect so early in this endeavour.
Copy the US? HAH! Theres a snowball’s chance in the Sahara for any arab culture to copy the US. Syria and the former regime of Iraq are dictatorial in nature. Hardly copies of a free democratic state.
I question the calls for an islamic state when shooting at the elements of the repressive regime hasnt stopped yet. I question the sincerity of anti-american demonstrations when there hasnt yet been any bad examples for them to demonstrate against. The US hasnt been in there long enuf and leaving now would just bring the former regime back. And I especially question the logic that a theocracy can do better than American capitalism for making Iraq rich.
indeed. Whats yer point?
:wally
China:
Yes, post WWII Gremany and Japan are what I was thinking of. Esp Japan. But you’re right, we’ve had some failures (as I already said) more recently.
As for the splintering of Iraq, we have seen this oh so recently in Yugoslovia. A tough regine gives the country a veneer of cohesion, but once that regime is gone neighbor begins to hate neighbor. Hopefully we can help set up some sort of federation that allows the various regions plenty of autonomy. As I’ve posted many times before, I’m not too optimistic for the outcome. Not in the long term.
Still, I think the US has a better shot than the UN. Is that saying we have a 10% chance ov success and the UN has a 5% chance? Maybe…
What I mean is that maybe the call for an Islamic state is more of a protest against secularlism and foreign rule than a desire to set up a state patterned on Iran after the Revolution, which is what I got the (possibly false) impression some people are suggesting.
Monty said China Guy: I’m guessing John Mace was referring to West Germany and Japan.
Hey, now that you bring it up why not let Germany be in charge. They’ve been getting a lot of practise rebuilding their eastern section.
BTW, I think a different success story is needed for me to give the nod to the US. The fractious nature of Iraq makes the post-ww2 Germany or Japan rebuild poor models.
No. The UN had nothing to do with rebuilding West Germany and Japan after WWII. That was done under purely national auspices. Entirely the USA in Japan and nearly entirely the USA in West Germany.
A UN “success” would be Rwanda.
You must also remember that Germany (specifically Berlin) was split into 4. One part each for the Russians, British, French and American. In the 50’s a wall was built to contain the Russian portion of Berlin which surrounded West Berlin. Compare the economic development of Communist East Germany to that of Capitalist Western Germany. Which experiment was succesful?
Carnalk:
You are corect. Iraq ain’t no Germnay. But if you can show me a country that has a GOOD success rate in nation building, then I’ll vote for them to take over in Iraq. Dogface’s post on Rwanda is spot on wrt the UN.
Hey, I think I made it clear that I think the odds are stacked against success for the US in Iraq. I just don’t see a better solution.
Then you think wrong. The Iraqi education system, like its healthcare system, has been in decline since the Gulf War. Pre 1991, adult literacy was at ~95%, comparable with the USA. Since then, it’s not so hot.
People blame Saddam for lots of things, but this is one thing they place firmly on the US, the UN, and all those who continued the sanctions against the country.
Do you have any reason whatsoever to believe that those calling for Islamism are “women” and “college professors”? Is everyone in the USA a woman or a college professor? Could you rustle up ten thousand people out of, say, New York, who weren’t college professors or women? I suspect you could.
Not at all. They’ve had plenty of time to prepare for this.
The US/UK coalition has been there for 15 years at least in its present form, and longer in its various other incarnations. We propped up Saddam, we waged war on them twice, we pressed a murderous sanctions regime that saw the country starve and run out of basic necessities while Saddam sat unscathed in gold-lined palaces. How short is YOUR memory? You remember Communism, don’t you?
its my understanding that after the failed Gulf War Iraq became more Islamicized in order to curry favor. Maybe they are secular compared to Iran but i doubt they qualify as truly secular.
Why doesn’t the failure of islamization & shari’a in states like Afghanistan or Iran cause these people to rethink the idea of an Islamic state? Islamic extremism doesn’t seem to work either.
I can’t speak for Egypt’s domestic situation, but Iraq & Syria are run by the Ba’ath party which was created on a mixture of fascist & leninist ideas. That is not a copy of western ideas, the west has fought against ideas like fascism & leninism for the last 60 years.
its my understanding that after the failed Gulf War Iraq became more Islamicized in order to curry favor. Maybe they are secular compared to Iran but i doubt they qualify as truly secular.
the failure of islamization & shari’a in states like Afghanistan or Iran should cause these people to rethink the idea of an Islamic state Islamic extremism doesn’t seem to work either.
I can’t speak for Egypt’s domestic situation, but Iraq & Syria are run by the Ba’ath party which was created on a mixture of fascist & leninist ideas. That is not a copy of western ideas, the west has fought against ideas like fascism & leninism for the last 60 years.
It depends on your definition of “works”, doesn’t it?
Maybe it’s not about making Iraq rich. Maybe it’s because this is what God wants them to do? You got proof it isn’t, have you? Well, Allah told me that we’re to cleanse the infidels from the land with martyrs blood. Looks like we’re at an impasse.
If people weren’t looking at this through US-centric eyes we might understand a bit more that their aims do not always mesh with what we think their aims should be.
damn doublepost
In elections, pushes for a moderate government always come up in Iran. If people dont like islamic totalism in Iran why would they like it in Iraq? Islamic totalism began in Iran. Did people want to live under the Taliban? After they were ousted, at least 2 million people who left came back to Afghanistan. I do not think most people want to live under extremist shari’a. Just the fundamentalists. Even in Saudi Arabia the economy is almost entirely oil driven. There is really nothing holding their economy up other than the fact htat they were lucky enough to have natural resources.
I not only think Islamization would inhibit economic growth as well as civil, political & human freedoms but people will get sick of living under fascism.
I do not think Islamization has worked for providing power or development to the Arab world. And i can’t remember where i read it, but its my understanding that although alot of peopel sympathize with Bin Ladin in the Middle east, they realize his brand of fascism would destroy them and they don’t want that type of life.
And then what. Another pie in the sky political philosophy for the Arab world while the rest of the world invents space travel, cures for cancer & has a per capita income 10x theirs?
Not really. Fascism and Leninist Marxism are both Western ideas. They were schools of thought and practice that were developed and attempted in the Western world, and failed in the Western world, but they are certainly not Eastern in origin or outlook. They originated in Europe and were elaborated as philosophies and implemented as governments in Europe and include many assumptions based on the particular social structures and cultural histories that underlie the societies (notably Germany) in which they arose or were developed. The fact that they were also defeated in the West does not mean that they were not Western.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by X~Slayer(ALE) *
Oh bloody hell, this is a hopeless task.
Well my ill-informed collocutor, it rather looks like quite a swath of society in the protests. College students, indeed. Women, the Shiite women interviewed on the way to the Shiite Hajj were supportive, etc. Certainly through all the data I have at my disposal it rather looks as if broad segments of Shiite society support the idea. It is rather in keeping with wider developments in the Arab world and in the region generally. Now, if you wish to argue with my observations, I dearly hope that you have some actual sourcing, and I really do prefer from sources that display some understanding.
I may add that Islamist sentiment in other Arab countries runs through the lower ends of the professional classes, is strong in the universities – secular universities and so on. While Islamism as a violent movement was fading – at least until recently, to think this is a matter of uneducated rubes is to simply display your lack of learning.
As for your follow-on comments in regards to education in Iraq, well now you get into the quality and not the type of education. In actual fact, until the Gulf War I, Iraq had a very solid and well-functioning system that was deeply respected in the region. Your snide aspersions, easy words, do not seem to be based on anything in particular than a poorly informed, TV driven superficial impression. As for the Iraqi Minister of Information, he was actually quite talented – having something a panache for spin in not one but two language – three really if you count his flair with Classical Arabic allusions, something I wager you do not have, that is a panache for spin or even witty repartee, in three languages. Some commentators in the Arab world have cast aspersion on his mixing Classical allusions with ‘common vulgarities’ but that strikes me as simple snobbery rather common of intellectuals around here in the region. Of course he had something of an impossible job, so why not have fun with it? He clearly did. In any case, if anything in terms of his skill with words in difficult situations and his language skills, he rather speaks well of the Iraqi educational system – at least as it exists in the 1950s and 1960s given his age. Now his morality is another matter – as part of the regime and at the top one really has to question it. But his education was pretty darn good. I would say he brought a nice bit of lighthearted inanity to the job.
Indeed, your mistake. Now why would I admit any such thing regarding the ‘veracity’? Having access to multiple sources of information, including Iraqis here – and speaking the bloody language fluently, they rather come of no surprise at all. None. Only naïve and ill-informed boosterism, based more off of self-indulgent and self-congratulatory navel gazing would lead one to be surprised at the demonstrations. Anyone who has bothered to follow the developments in the Arab world for the past 30 years could easily predict this kind of response, for all that it is not impossible to address.
Well my fine fellow, who seems not to have an inkling of history at hand, the United States was not an unpopular model on a number of social grounds in the 1950s – the US was in fact popular. However, in terms of “us” I was referring to the West and secular systems, and even there, if one has some vague inkling of history, one would be aware of the degree, from the late 19th century to the 1950s or so, even into the 1960s. Now given the issues that any of the countries in the region, obviously one could not just fucking start a democracy. “Free Democratic States” require civil societies, shared senses of identity, a clear set of rules of the game and a large portion of society buying into those rules, acceptance of the concept of popular sovereignty – something that was only achieved with difficulty in Europe even, and only in the past century. Nothing in the colonial experiences, except to an extent in Egypt and there often opposed by the very colonial power on the ‘civilizing mission,’ built either institutions or cultural and social habits conducive to the success in the rather artificial boundaries of most of the states. Secularist leaders of the post-independence period saw, in many ways correctly, that they needed to build strong states to build a strong national identity out of nothing. The Europeans had gone through the same process in many respects in the prior century – creating Frenchmen and Germans out of various provincials.
Quite clearly things went wrong, however the model was explicitly Western in inspiration, although that eventually switched over to that other Western ideology, socialism. Communism never went down that well for its explicit atheism. This in many respects a political reaction to Western dominance of the region in the 1950s and 1960s – poorly handled relations too dependant on narrow corrupt elites. Well sounds bloody familiar now doesn’t it?
Merely hand wavingly dismissing the Syrian regime, the Iraqi regime (supported by the US through the 1980s for its secularism and modernizing image) and others as dictatorships is not a point at all.
It is usually helpful to base “questioning” on some level of actual information, as opposed to mere supposition and imagination.
Regarding the bad examples, they are legion in fact. The chaos that followed the collapse of the regime, whatever excuses and however valid, was very clearly blamed on the occupiers who were seen as letting it happen. In fact, they did – one can find quotes early on from ground commanders indicating they were letting the government buildings be looted to impress on the populace the old regime was over. A move the backfired as the chaos clearly got out of hand and as clearly gave the American and British forces the image of sanctioning the destruction of national heritage and resources. Tied to this has been the slow flow of aid and the expectations that Americans should instantly make things better, tied to the idea they should go immediately (as well as their expectations of the role of military units, which had more civil roles).
We may further look to the sanctions, which Iraqis widely blamed as much on the Americans as on the regime – speaking in private to Iraqi exiles in the region one easily heard this dual blame, and further back in time to backing Sadaam on numerous occasions, including when the Baath came to power.
Beyond this, pure nationalism, and hostility to the idea of a second colonial system – with the same promises of a ‘better’ government than what went before – history which you are blissfully ignorant of, but which is high in the consciousness of people in this region. Finally, there is of course the pure hostility to any invader, on dual nationalist-religious grounds.
How long is long “enuf” is an Iraqi judgment, quite clearly, and it was clear, as I warned before the war, even among the anti-Sadaam crowd of Iraqi exiles there was little to no patience for a foreign presence in Iraq. Nationalism.
As for the logic that “theocracy” – an Islamic state might or might not be theocracy in fact – being better than “American Capitalism” – well you’re not there now are you? Nor have you grown up under another system in which your expectations are radically different in regards to the role of the state and the understanding of the ‘private sector.’ This of course says nothing of a relationship between an Islamic state and capitalism – there being no inherent contradiction excluding how to make financing work depending on how strict one wants to get on Ribh (interest). Certainly there is enough Islamic banking experience around that this could work – I have my own reservations as this is my field, but if that is what it takes. Regardless, right or wrong, Iraqi understandings of what is needed informs their reaction, not your rather poorly informed understanding (as you clearly lack any idea on Islamic law or the history of the country.)
My point lad is you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.
[quote]
The Calculus of Logic
Your understanding is, well, not an understanding. The Iraqi regime was resolutely secular, aside from 1990s nods to Islamic symbolism. The regime did not change its curriculum in any real sense, and largely engaged in some empty symbolic moves to try to diffuse opposition, which given the nature of the regime’s suppression of other political formations, and the greater resiliency of the Mosques as independent spaces, if only vaguely so – as in other secular regimes such as Algeria, Egypt etc. – regime opposition entered religious spaces. “Doubting” Iraq’s secularism is convenient for trying to find some kind of means of explaining away the current reaction, but it is unfactual. I really wish people’s “doubts” and “thoughts” would start to be based on something approaching fact. Regardless, any superficial introduction of Islamic themes after 50-60 years of hard core secularism is a pitiful explanation for the religious reaction seen in Iraq. Rather better are the parallels to another imposed secularism, that of the Communist regimes in East Europe and the FSU, wherein one also saw something of a religious reaction to Communist secularism. The parallels are there, if highly inexact.
Oh I don’t know, why doesn’t the failure of secularism to date in the region cause you to rethink secularism? Why your belief system allows you to explain it away. Simple enough, eh what? Further, of course, there are issues of information and the degree to which Iran is seen as a failure. Not everyone sees the Iranian experiment as a failure, certainly it is no worse than most if not all of the secular states in the region on many counts.
Afghanistan, on the other hand, is (a) not an Arab state (b) the Taleban were never regarded as a valid model by Islamists in the Arab world – one found widespread condemnation of their backwoods mentality throughout the Arab press. The Muslim Brotherhood underground / al-Qaeda people exploited them, but they were not one in the same, indeed neither are moderate Islamists who desire to see an Islamically founded state of the same mind as the quasi-messianic al-Qaeda types.
So, the answer is double: (a) not many in the region would agree that Iran is a failure (or a total failure) and (b) the idea of the Islamic state, above all in Sunni circles, is quite variable. I might add that the example of Shiite Islamism in Lebanon is really moderately successful on its own terms – something of a well-working state within a state, although that has lessened as Hizbullah has moved into the role of a political party in Lebanon. The POV in the region is a far more negative on the secular state, which is rather less ambiguously a failure to date, than on the Islamic state – which for its lack of application maintains a nice vagueness.
For all that I would agree with many analysts that the radicals were on the wane until perhaps recently, even while Islamic appeals have penetrated mainstream politics, for the Islamists have an often well-deserved reputation for being clean and honest. Reformer types tend to be so, regardless of their ideology.
These kind of statements give me a headache. Sometimes I really wonder.
Primo, the Baath party was not created out of a mixture of Fascist and Leninst ideas. Let me quote the respected Lapidus on the Baath:
In short, they were hardly founded on fascist and Leninist grounds. Certainly Baath expressed sympathy for anyone who was against their colonizers (France and Britain), but the founding philosophy could not be characterized as fascist. Later on the movement drifted into extremism, but it was not founded on it – unless you think it is reasonable to call French socialism extremism.
Like analogous Egyptian movements, the secularists in the Levant and Iraq were explicitly motivated by Western models (Fascism is of course also quite Western, just the ugly step-child, unless Germany and Italy suddenly are expelled from the ‘West’ – however this is merely an analytical point) which they were looking to try to adapt to the realities of societies that were just emerging from the Ottoman regime.
Later on in its history, the Baath became more radical, but they were never truly ‘Leninist’ in theory – for all that Stalinist political habits were adopted out of pure power plays and largely in response to Islamist opposition, e.g. the armed resistance to Baath rule in Syria by the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhouan al-Muslimine), originally much of the Baath socialism was motivated by the clear need to obtain land reform to break up the huge estates that dominated the region, legacy of the Ottoman quasi-feudal rule, and to try to establish conditions in which a modern, relatively egalitarian society could be established.
In short, they wanted to remake their societies, on their terms, along generally Western lines – the solidarity between Xians and Muslims symbolic of a new Arab and non-religious identity.
First, Islamic totalitarianism did not ‘begin’ in Iran – indeed Iran is hardly well-described as totalitarian as the genuinely contested if highly flawed elections they hold on a regular basis, in which reformist elements win seats despite conservative opposition, shows.
Iran is a queer creature, between democracy and theocracy, and is evolving. Further, it is largely the only country in the region that seems to be evolving a political system that has legitimacy on its own terms, and shows movement. Many people in the Middle East point to Iran’s evolution towards something that looks like genuine popular democracy, slowly painfully, in stark contrast with the good sixty years of standing still in the secular Arab states.
Beyond that, it is not clear that Iranians do not want to live in an Islamic state per se, but that the urbanized youth want to see something more liberal. That does not mean, ipso facto, not an Islamic state, but rather a liberalized state. Can an Islamic state include liberalization? Certainly there Shiite theologians, in somewhat important contrast to their Sunni comrades, have engaged modernity and one finds the Ulema in Iran on both sides of the divide, and one finds serious theologians make more or less liberal arguments. Movement, debate, as well ugly repression and suppression.
Contrast that with the secular states and the quasi secular rulers of the Gulf. No movement, no real debate, no real give and take.
It is more than something of a straw man to raise the Afghani example, insofar as the Taleban ‘Sharia’ was repulsive to the Iranians – the Taleban harshly repressed Shiites, and many refugees were Shiites, but also Iranian Shiite theology was and is significantly more liberal than the obscurantist backward village theology of the Taleban.
Your last item in regards to the Saudi economy is frankly a non-sequitur. There is nothing in Saudi and without oil there will be nothing (except religious tourism) regardless of their religious stance. That is quite simply the reality. They are a desert, with scrubland being their best natural greenery for the most part. This, my fellow, has little to nothing to do with the religion.
As to who would want to live under some form of Shariah, well in my decade of experience in the region, I have found a wide range of people, frustrated with the failure of their present systems who would like to give it a try. Otherwise moderate professionals, frustrated with corruption, poorer classes frustrated with corruption – indeed much of society outside of the rentier elites. The appeal of the Islamist parties – which let me stress cover a wide range from the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood related factions to the harder core radicals ready to use violence – is they promise to address festering social issues, social dislocation caused by rapid population growth, stagnate buying power and equally rapid urbanization. Comforting and compelling answers for people who see no way out.
Finally, it is not at all clear that those calling for an Islamic state want an ‘extremist’ Sharia state. Obviously want counts as extremist is something defined locally, and I note there are not many refugees from Iran, on the basis of the Sharia. Certainly there are no small numbers of the old elite that fled the Revolution, but that is something of a different issue.
Thus, when comparing what people know – a secular regime that was brutally repressive, arbitrary and cruel, from what they can aspire to, the promise of a purer state based on ‘God’s Law’ many will like that idea. The devil will be in the details. Your semi-informed take hardly merits consideration since you seem not to have much of a clue as to the social and economic drivers.
First, Islamism is not fascism, so let stop these word games. They do little to enlighten, and much to obscure.
Second, Islamist thought covers some pretty wide ground. Some of it is socialist tinged, deriving influence oddly enough from the secular pan-Arab socialism that infused the region in the 1960s and 1970s (and before), much of it is not, indeed more modernist ‘Islamists’ have supported moves to develop what is called modern Islamic finance as a means of developing institutions and theoretical frameworks compatible with both Sunnah (in their understanding) and the needs of the modern economy. Not all are obscurantist. Islam itself clearly has a more commercial orientation than Xianity, and making money is not seen as a bad thing per se, unlike in traditional Xian thought. Having seen the development of Islamic financing facilities, I can say that while I am not a fan of them, they are workable and were Iraq to adopt a hybrid system it would likely work, should the institutions be strong enough. I doubt anyone would try a pure Islamic finance system. Other sectors of commercial activity I see no Shariah problems at all, other than perhaps some contractual issues, but they can be worked around. The real danger is not Islamism, it is pure and simple, nationalism and the urge to protectionism. However as the US steel tariffs showed last year (or so) this is hardly only the problem of states in the Middle East, nor Islamic states.
As to the issue of freedoms and civil rights, while it is likely that any Islamic state is not going to be pleasing to the Western liberal, I have lived around here long enough to come to the opinion that window dressing rights and the like put on nice constitutional paper to please the sensitive Westerner but then ignored in large part are worse than just getting down to what society supports.
It seems likely to me that any set of civil rights hammered out in Iraq, which is a mixed community, will of necessity be a compromise. Better they respond to popular ideas of right, wrong and social justice than not.
Let me add as an interjection that I am not a fan of an Islamic state, nor of any of the developments I think likely if the state is based off of what has popular legitimacy, but I am a fan of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. My decade of experience tells me better imperfect institutions with real viability in the culture and society, than perfect ones that end up dysfunctional grafts.
Well, insofar as there are precious few examples of Islamization (one being Sudan which is quite fucked up for reasons moderately external to the Turabi regime’s ostensible Islamism.) of the State so I am not sure what you are actually pointing to. Iran? The rest of the Arab and Islamic worlds of the region have hardly any examples to point to. Some small scale positives and negatives, e.g. in Lebanon under Hizbullah which I am led to understand have been very decent managers of their communities, although others differ to an extent on that judgment.
As for your second statement, it is a rather poorly constructed straw man – aside from it also being simply simplistic abusive use of the word fascist insofar as al-Qaeda philosophy bears no resemblance to fascism. The observation that many sympathize with Bin Laden is not truly on point. There are several levels one runs into this. (a) pure anti-Westernism such that even secularists might express some sympathy for his fight against the West (b) sympathy for the Islamist project, but unwilling to go as far as al-Qaeda’s extreme radicalism, which is extreme by any standards.
Islamization of government and society need not be al-Qaeda – there are a number of avenues to take, to draw this kind of reductionist straw man simply clouds one’s judgment.
I should be categorical. I do not like the idea of an Islamic State in Iraq I am no fan of Islamism per se. However, I have had enough experience with the movement to differentiate between its strains and see (a) its genuine attraction to the people in the region (b) ways in which a moderate, somewhat liberalized version of the movement could result in more genuine change than imposed secularism that the less informed and imaginative around here think is sine qua non.
Perhaps, although I would have hoped for less trite and hackneyed list. Economic growth is an issue, one that needs to be addressed through structural reforms. I am not convinced democracy and serious structural reforms go hand in hand, viz Tunisia which is something of a stand out performer in the region among the non-oil economies, and hardly a liberal state, although resolutely secular. Well-managed, it is the exception to my negative comments on secularism in the region, but the question poses, can it last after Ben Ali?
There are no easy answers, not secularism, not Islamist thought.
I agree, which is part of why I didn’t want us to get involved, in addition to my general “leave the world alone” position. Iraq is an artificial state, like Yugoslavia. The fall of the Ottoman Turks after WW1 added a bid stretch of land to Iraq in the north, Turkey should be allowed to have that back now if the people there are amenable to that. It ought to split into smaller countries. We have no business trying to stop that by forcing them to stay together, just so the geography department doesn’t have to order new maps, and they don’t have to find room at the UN for a couple more seats. Maybe it’s best if we just help them divide into smaller countries peaceably, without the inevitable bloodshed.
Mace:
Perhaps rather than simply throwing out the observation, let’s look at this a trifle analytically.
First, in regards to successes in rebuilding for the US, I think it is perhaps just a trifle useful to think clearly about this subject.
On the positive end of the ledger we can find Germany and Japan. I have elsewhere argued neither of these are particularly good “models” nor lessons for rebuilding Iraq. Both were cohesive unitary states with clear national identities, largely clear adherence or acceptance of a Western model of rationalized, secular government, in the context of an uncontested war with widespread legitimacy and without acceptable (to the populace) competing counter-ideologies untainted by the war. Each also began with, for the time, more or less first world infrastructures, despite massive war damage in the case of Germany.
In Iraq none of these conditions hold. The state is not accepted as a nation by a significant percentage of the population, overall national identity is weak relative to competing forms of social organization (e.g. tribal and religious particularism), the war itself came in the context of little international legitimacy and there exists several competing anti-occupation ideologies that remain unassociated with the old regime – that is Sunni and Shiite Islamism, as well as of course Kurdish separatism. Further, the preferred model for government rehabilitation, the western secular model, albeit this time remade somewhat more democratically is the model largely discredited. 50 years under this kind of government has largely failed in the region, 100 or so years of secularism has largely failed. Now one can argue these are for external reasons, that is reasons external to secularism, which may very well be true, but the reality is that almost no one in the region can see any signs of success, whereas at least Islamic models give a sense of appealing to a threatened sense of self-identity.
Now returning to American reconstruction efforts:
(a) Cuba: that worked out brilliantly of course, the Batista regime having ended successfully. Perhaps unfair to call the late 19th c.-early 20th century American interventions in Cuba nation building, but worth mentioning.
(b) Philippines: Whether taken as post Spanish rule, with our conquest of the Philippines or post-1945, little there to recommend itself in terms of US success in nation building in a situation roughly (very roughly) analogous to Iraq in terms of weak national identity with contested nationalism and minority separatism.
© Central America: Various interventions. Do they count? Perhaps not, yet on the other hand some warning here regarding American capacities in regards to unilaterally remaking a region.
(d) Haiti: a long series of interventions from the late 19th century forward to the 1990s, none particularly recommending themselves as brilliant successes in getting the nation on its feet.
I could go on if I were better learned in US history I am sure. Now I am wondering what UN efforts we are thinking of when we speak of failed efforts? It strikes me that unless there is a balanced and informed comparision of the efforts, all one is doing is engaging in empty prejudice (and this goes in the opposite direction as well, the list above is illustrative of what could be argued.)