" "We are on the edge of civil war," said Noah Feldman, a New York University professor and chief U.S. adviser to Iraq on the writing of the country's new constitution. "

"NF: I should say, my role during the drafting of the TAL was not an oversight role, it was a purely consultative role. I was no longer working with the US government, I was working directly with the Iraqis on a pro bono basis. But the U.S. was involved in this process, and here the U.S. did try to effect substantive outcomes in this document, by exercising its own influence. I think that on some points we probably went further than we should have done, in terms of particularized political solutions."
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"MJ.com: Can you explain how your concept of nation-building differs from how it's been defined in the past—by, for instance, the Hague Convention or the League of Nations?

NF: Sure. Under the Hague Convention, the idea was that the occupier essentially held the occupied people in trust for their rightful sovereign—who was assumed to own those people himself. Under the League of Nations this view changed a little bit, so that now the occupier was supposed to hold in trust the future of the people who were being governed. They were assumed to be unready to rule themselves, so the view was that the occupying power would hold their political development in trust, as if they were children who needed to be brought up self-government.

Under the view that I'm proposing, the only thing that the occupier holds in trust is the temporary authority to govern. It's exactly the same as when we elect a government, that government has authority only until the next set of elections. So my view entails much greater obligations of responsiveness and oversight than any other models do. And it assumes that in the relatively short-term future, authority will be transferred to the people who are being subjected to occupation, in order for them to divine their own political interests, and govern themselves."
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"MJ.com: Now in your book you make the good point that elections should not be the end-point of nation-building. But don't you think that's essentially what we're seeing in Iraq?

NF: Well, the first point is that just because you've elected a government doesn't mean a government can actually govern. You haven't accomplished nation-building just by electing a government, since a nation-state requires institutions that are actually running the country and protecting its borders. I am worried that some people in the US government, and certainly the general public, may look at the fact of Iraq's elections and say, "OK we fulfilled our obligations, we held elections, now let's roll, we're out of here." That really could be disastrous—it could lead to a rapid and premature withdrawal that plunges the country into civil war. "
http://www.mojones.com/news/qa/2005/01/feldman.html