Chapter 1: Why “Property” - Foreign Military Studies Office - U.S. Army

drugs, people or plutonium; or if murder is perpetrated by suicide,landmines or something bigger, our best understanding holds someplaces more likely than others to be source-grounds of dangerousbehavior. The United States has apparently determined that peacefulmeasures cannot timely deter some smugglers and murderers fromdoing it grave harm, and considers itself within its right to label themenemies, and to visit preemptive violence on them. The nature ofthings thus stated (and regardless of the validity of the posture in anygiven case) the national strategy documents of the United Statesexpress an observation that underlying social, economic and culturalconditions help determine if a foreign place will birth or aid theintolerable.The United States has proposed a goal: to protect itself, and acorollary hypothesis: that to do so it must destroy an identified enemy,and at the same time ameliorate conditions that create enemies.Whether or not it is succeeding in the latter is for the reader to decideand is not the point of this work. However, restating the upshot --efforts to ameliorate the conditions that create enemies will fail if theyare not founded on the improvement of property systems, whatever elseis or is not done. The social contract is the property system and viceversa.To the extent the property regime in Haiti is better now than itwas a decade ago Haiti will proceed away from the kinds of behaviorsthat are dangerous both to Haitians and to others. This will becorrespondingly true for Iraq ten years into the future. Unfortunately,despite all the foreign developmental and security resources expendedon Haiti, too little was directed at building the social contract asevidenced in a functioning property system -- and the dishearteningresult is patent. The same may be true of Iraq.American strategic and military thinking has evolved in thecontext of state-on-state concepts, which are obsolescing. With somany non-state entities able to enter lethal competitions, it can beclumsy and misleading to define conflicts according to large physicalspaces. The new power entities, whether dangerous in the context ofsome apparently localized contest over control of valuable resources, or5