A VICTORY ONE CAN LIVE WITH? July's Reason includes an article on the difficulties of nation-building. Authors Justin Logan and Christopher Preble, both affiliated with the Cato Institute, are not pleased with the Bush Administration's turnabout from Governor Bush's 2000 skepticism about using the U.S. military for nation-building.

That’s why we’re alarmed that the Bush administration has created a nation-building corps from America: the State Department’s new Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was established by Congress in July 2004. The office’s mandate is to “help stabilize and reconstruct societies in transition from conflict or civil strife, so they can reach a sustainable path toward peace, democracy, and a market economy.” Meanwhile, a November 2005 Defense Department directive makes stability operations a “core U.S. military mission.” Such operations would involve on-the-ground assistance, not unlike the provisional reconstruction teams in Iraq...

Deeper into the article, however, is the material I'd like to expand upon.

In the most thorough survey of American nation-building missions, the RAND Corporation in 2003 evaluated seven cases: Japan and West Germany after World War II, Somalia in 1992–94, Haiti in 1994–96, Bosnia from 1995 to the present, Kosovo from 1999 to the present, and Afghanistan from 2001 to the present. Assessing the cases individually, the authors count Japan and West Germany as successes but all the others as failures to various degrees. They then try to determine what made the Japanese and West German operations succeed when all the nation-building efforts since have failed.

The authors note one possible source of the difference.

Although “postconflict success often depends on significant political changes,” it said, the “barriers to transformation of [an] opponent’s society [are] immense.” And in the absence of a decisive outcome between warring parties (such as happened in World War II), there is always a danger that violence will continue.

Put another way, the road to a successful transformation of the adversary might involve actions the victor might regret. Here's Professor Bainbridge with some specifics.

[T]he greatest generation had doubts about the morality of the strategic bombing campaign even in the midst of the war. The British denied Bomber Harris a peerage in 1946 (although they did offer him one in 1951, which he refused), even though they gave peerages to virtually all of the UK's other major World War II commanders at that time. Bomber Command did not get a separate campaign medal. And so on.

Indeed, there seems little doubt but that the strategic bombing campaign violated the precepts of a just war. In particular, it violated the tenets of proportionality and discrimination. Proportionality holds that the response to aggression should not be disproportionate to the original aggression. Was the deliberate firebombing of Dresden or Hamburg, say, proportional to the Blitz? As for discrimination, there is no doubt that Bomber Harris and his US counterparts deliberately targeted German and Japanese citizens.

His summation:

[A] just war must be fought justly. And we do the so-called greatest generation no service if we ignore their serious moral failings in this regard. The West, after all, is supposed to be the good guys.

But how much of the difference in effect between the Blitz and the thousand-plane raids was attributable to incompetence on the German side? And what persuasion is permissible against citizens of a bellicose government? Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber takes one position.

[T]he current actions of the Israeli government , in bombing facilities like Beirut Airport and a power station in Gaza, in deliberately making civilians suffer (and in many cases causing their deaths) are illegal and disproportionate, words that don’t do justice to the bloody reality. Collective punishment and reprisal are not permissible actions, but that is plainly what is going on here. Lebanese people are being killed as a matter of policy in order to put pressure on the Lebanese government.

Betsy's Page takes another.

Just imagine if there was a breakaway terrorist group in northern Mexico that sought to destroy the United States and was lobbing rockets across the border into the United States killing and endangering all the people who lived in the Southwest. Suppose Mexico was helpless to stop those renegades and so we launched attacks against them ourselves. And then you had some thoughtful people throughout the globe telling us that we needed to negotiate with those terrorists.

Note in her hypothetical that the Mexican government, as appears to be the case with the Lebanese government, is not capable of being a government, which is to say, maintaining its monopoly on violence. The German and Japanese militaries were not rogue militias acting independently, perhaps with some encouragement from other powers. That makes identifying the "warring party" to be on the receiving end of a "decisive outcome" somewhat more difficult. (And many policy-makers continue to work under the impression that there are oppressed everyday Muslims held hostage to the ambitions of a few crazies.)