Success Requires Patience
By Niall Ferguson
Monday, May 3, 2004
"Our patience is not eternal," declared Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief spokesman for the U.S. military command in Baghdad recently. Well, yes. Unfortunately, lack of patience has been one of the major flaws of the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein last year.
This impatience is nothing new. It has been a recurrent feature in the history of American overseas intervention. In the 106 years since the American age of empire formally began -- with the war against Spain in 1898 -- the United States has intervened militarily in many places, from Lebanon to Liberia, from Cuba to Cambodia. In only a few can it be said to have attempted both regime change and the institutional transformation we now call "nation-building."
In some cases, the United States has stayed for a very long time indeed. It annexed Hawaii and turned Guam and American Samoa into permanent possessions. The Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands were added during the two wo