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The Army, he writes, has long resisted investing or engaging in peace operations, even though every recent conflict, from Panama to Kosovo, has required such operations to attain the desired objectives. One reason for this failure, he suggests, is that the Army's mandate and historic task has been to fight high-intensity wars. Another is that the military-industrial complex makes its money off high-tech weaponry and not off such things as language training or the development of skills to deal with policing and legal systems. Furthermore, the Republican-controlled Congresses of the 1990s could be counted upon to vote against anything that smacked of "nation-building." In the mid-1990s the Clinton Administration tried to create an interagency capability for dealing with failed states, such as Haiti and Somalia, but the effort never got very far, and the Bush Administration brushed it aside. Thus before the invasion there was no structure or organization within the US government with the expertise to plan for the future of Iraq--much less one with the resources to implement such a plan. Then, too, Clark writes, by going to war without international support and by refusing to cede any power over the political process afterward, Bush forfeited the help he might have received from other governments and from international organizations that had expertise and resources to contribute. The Army and the Iraqi people are now paying the price for these failures.
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