On May 24, 2003, “the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace issued a report noting that the United States had engaged in some 200 military interventions abroad since its founding, sixteen of which could be classified as ‘nation-building’ efforts in which the goal was to change a hostile regime or insure the survival of a friendly regime that might otherwise have collapsed. Of the sixteen attempts, the researchers noted, only four cases–Japan and Germany after World War II, Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989–qualified as successes in which durable, democratic regimes were created. None of those countries bore much resemblance to Iraq. Worse, the study found that when American nation-building efforts foundered, the governments that emerged were often brutal dictatorships or corrupt authoritarian regimes.”
– Todd S. Purdum and The New York Times Staff, A Time of Our Choosing, Pages 276-277