State's State-Building Mandate?

Chris Brose over at Shadow Government has sketched out some thoughts on how the Department of State might be restructured to operate less like 1950s-era GM and more like a Google of today. Informed as they are by several years of hands-on experience dealing with the unwieldy bureaucracy, his observations are very insightful and worth a read.

That said, this passage (in the second of the two posts) troubled me:

What Amb. Crocker and Gen. Petraeus created was a model for an integrated, results-based country team that unified all of our tools of national power to help Iraqis build an increasingly decent, capable state that can provide security and essential services for its people. Responsibility was decentralized, from Washington to Baghdad, and from Baghdad to the provinces. U.S. civilians were empowered and moved out of the capital on Provincial Reconstruction Teams where they could assess local needs and support Iraqi state-building. And they were able to summon and integrate all of the tools of our national power to do so. Or to put it another way, to generate “smart power.”

Now, Iraq is clearly an exceptional case, but how it differs from, say, a Sudan, or a Mexico, or a Yemen, or even a less fragile and better functioning state like Ghana is more that of scale than of kind. The challenges and circumstances of developing countries like these are unique, but the goal is the same: state-building. And the U.S. approach should be similar too: joint country teams led by civilians, invested with far greater responsibility relative to Washington, supporting local partners, and aligning whatever U.S. tools are needed to help build state capacity: development programs, military assistance, legal training, police support, trade agreements, whatever.

This isn’t to say that diplomats should be performing these functions themselves. But State should be leading the interagency effort in these countries. And too often now it is not — in part because of lack of resources, but also in large part because much of the organization still does not see that as its role. And by organization, I mean the prevailing views of people in the middle and upper ranks who shape the culture and the incentives of State.

The passage seems uncontroversial at first glance until the implication sinks in: an important role for our diplomatic bureaucracy should be state-building?

Perhaps I’m being unfair in my reading of Chris’s essays, but I get the sense that he’s taken away the wrong lesson from Iraq. If I have any overwhelming objection to our Iraq adventure, it’s that it’s forced us into the full-time practice of the wretched field of state-building in the first place. Chris seems to see it as something we ought to be doing more of in the world, and that getting it as right as we can in Iraq will provide a good blueprint going forward. While there are certainly a good toolset of best practices to be gleaned from Iraq, the main lesson should be “try to avoid getting yourself into a situation where you’re forced to rebuild a state from scratch.”

State-building should be one of the many tools we have in our policy swiss army knife—it just shouldn’t be a goal of American foreign policy. We should think of it as a skill-set that can be called upon as needed when we find ourselves in a situation that requires it, but it shouldn’t be something we “do” as a matter of policy. It’s a subtle but important distinction.