US paradox of construction and
destruction By James M Carter
Recent building activity in Iraq has taken
place amid growing violence. Contractors operate
equipment under the crackle of automatic weapon
fire and with the protection of M-1 tanks, Stryker
vehicles and Apache helicopters. The workers in
this case are constructing a series of walls to
block certain areas of Sadr City, the vast Shi'ite
slum in Baghdad.
Dozens of walls have
already been built around Baghdad, the southern
city of Basra and other Iraqi cities, creating
segregated ethnic Sunni and Shi'ite neighborhoods
ringed with checkpoints and command posts. The
latest flurry of construction activity has little
to do with nation building, but rather is more
related to a deteriorating security environment.
The US is now five long years into what
has turned into an
enormous nation-building project
where success has proven elusive, difficult to
measure and subject to frequent sudden reversals.
The last time the US engaged in such an ambitious,
costly and long-term undertaking was several
decades ago in Vietnam. It is useful now to
consider the lessons from that experience,
particularly considering that Vietnam began not as
a war but rather as an ambitious project to build
a new state, South Vietnam.
Many
commentators contend that there are enough
important differences between the current military
adventurism in Iraq and its past experience
Vietnam to scotch the relevance of comparison. But
the fundamental paradox of simultaneous
construction and destruction mirrors starkly the
US's finally futile effort in Vietnam, where
similarly the inability to achieve political
objectives met with increased military and
security measures.
Built for
destruction "Motor grader operators
work with loaded carbines at their sides; ...
scrapers cut roads across the shadows of hastily
prepared gun emplacements; a lean, tanned
construction superintendent waxes enthusiastic
over the future while helicopters stutter overhead
looking for enemy guerrillas."
The above
description is not from the latest edition of the
New York Times reporting from Iraq, but rather
from a journalist covering the US's massive
construction effort amid the war in Vietnam in
1966. Then, the project to build a separate state
out of the southern half of Vietnam involved the
energies of the best and brightest academic
experts in economics, political science, police
systems and government, as well as dozens of
private corporations which specialized in
engineering and construction.
The idea was
to quickly build up southern Vietnam's primitive
physical infrastructure while putting in place a
government in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City)
advised and funded by Washington. The working
assumption was that the local people would be
grateful and welcoming, and, working alongside
American advisors and experts, would contribute to
the invention of a new, prosperous and
non-communist state. Between 1954 and 1960, the US
poured US$1.5 billion (about $9 billion in today's
inflation-adjusted dollars) into what was then
still viewed as a limited nation-building project.
When that effort met with armed resistance
by the insurgent National Liberation Front, the US
responded by ramping up the military side of the
aid program, spending lavishly on training and
equipping the forces of its client regime in
Saigon. The pillars of US policy at that point
were strategic hamlets, which aimed at placing
people in secure, heavily guarded encampments
walled off from surrounding areas, and
counterinsurgency tactics against the guerilla
resistance.
The short period between 1960
and 1963 brought war to Vietnam in response to the
failure of US efforts to build a new country to be
known as South Vietnam. As the resistance expanded
and the regime in Saigon was plagued by problems
of illegitimacy, leadership and corruption, the US
administration of Lyndon Johnson responded with a
"surge" of its own. However, the escalation did
not initially involve US troops, but rather was
led by a consortium of major private construction
firms - Raymond Intl, Morrison-Knudsen, Brown
& Root, and J A Jones Construction.
Those four firms, though not the only
firms working on projects in southern Vietnam,
were responsible for building a vast modern
military infrastructure designed to make the new
country defensible against insurgent forces. The
consortium, which dubbed itself The Vietnam
Builders, went on to complete a nearly miraculous
military construction effort - not to mention a
strong fiscal stimulus for the US economy.
The builders moved 91 million cubic yards
of earth, used 48 million tons of rock and 11
million tons of asphalt and poured 3.7 million
yards of concrete, enough to have built a wall two
feet wide and five feet high completely around
southern Vietnam. In all, the consortium built six
major ports with 29 deep draft berths, six naval
bases, eight jet airstrips, twelve airfields, just
under 20 base camps, including housing for 450,000
servicemen and their families, and at the peak of
construction employed 50,000 mostly Vietnamese
workers.
The work of these firms made
possible the deployment of over 540,000 US troops
by the end of the decade and allowed over 500,000
tons of supplies to pour into southern Vietnam
each month. In short, they made prolonged war
possible, but in so doing exposed the paradox of
simultaneous construction and destruction. Despite
all those building efforts, the US never overcame
the more substantive obstacles to nation building
success: a lack of political legitimacy, rampant
corruption and a hemorrhaging economy.
Those obstacles had little to do with the
war itself and thus defied traditional military
solutions. Rather, increased militarization only
made matters worse, as the intensified conflict
destroyed the countryside and public health
infrastructure, ravaged the economy, increased the
regime's dependence on the US, and each year
turned over 100,000 war casualties, not to mention
millions of refugees.
High speed failure
The war completely undermined the
larger nation building effort, which had first
prompted US involvement in Vietnam. In Iraq, we
are witnessing a sort of replay of Vietnam -
although at a dramatically faster speed.
The nation building exercise in Iraq has,
at best, yielded mixed results. Despite the
billions of US dollars spent on the occupation,
on-going war and political and physical
reconstruction (estimated at around US$500 billion
so far), Iraqis still suffer chronic shortages of
electricity and drinkable water. Public health
infrastructure remains a major problem, resulting
in high rates of disease and infection. The
communications and transportation grid is highly
unreliable, exacerbating other economic problems
including the emergence of black markets for basic
commodities, including, ironically, gasoline.
To be sure, some progress has been made
since the dark days of 2004-2005, when the
occupation and war against insurgents contributed
to the wanton destruction of Iraq's infrastructure
and made rebuilding nearly impossible. Private US
companies such as Halliburton, Kellogg Brown &
Root, DynCorp, and Blackwater USA continue to work
under US Defense Department contracts worth
billions of dollars, despite growing controversy
about their activities. Hundreds of others, about
one third of which are located outside the US and
are thus more difficult to monitor, are also at
work rebuilding Iraq.
The value of Federal
contracts for construction and security in Iraq
has grown by half from $11 billion in 2004 to $25
billion in 2006. In 2007, congressional
investigation found $10 billion lost in
over-pricing and waste. Yet US officials can
scarcely account for the level of private
contractor corruption and its consequences that
has prevailed since the initial invasion in 2003.
Amid widespread charges of fraud,
corruption and even direct involvement in violence
and the killing of civilians, these private US
corporations remain thoroughly ensconced and
constitute an important and controversial element
of the US occupation. Meanwhile, violence has
spiked across the country on the eve of provincial
elections which the Bush administration and the
American-sponsored regime in Baghdad see as
crucial to legitimizing the regime and, indeed,
the whole project for stabilizing Iraq.
As
the US's Vietnam experience showed, war is not the
same as nation building. If ever larger military
deployments are necessary simply to hold ground,
then perhaps it's high time to admit that the Iraq
project has already failed. Vietnam showed that
greater militarization will only bring more
destruction, suffering and political polarization
and accentuate the paradox of simultaneous
construction and destruction, which unfortunately
has found painful new life in Iraq.
James M Carter
is an assistant professor of history at Texas A
& M University in the United States and the
author of Inventing Vietnam: The United States
and State Building, 1954-1968 from Cambridge
University Press.
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