Perhaps it is a conceit of Americans' self-image as one of the greatest powers in history that motivates comparisons with ancient Athens and Rome in seeking to explain a singularly disastrous foreign escapade. Or maybe the hubris of earlier empires really does offer better insight than the omnipresent Munich and Vietnam analogies into a folly that swiftly took us from "America's greatest strategic triumph" in the Cold War to "our greatest strategic blunder" in Iraq. Yet unexamined is still another perspective-that the Cold War's end is not just a reference point for how fast and how far our influence has fallen, but is the very episode whose misunderstanding lured us into such a colossal misadventure in the first place. Put differently, rather than the lessons of classical Greece and Rome, or of mid twentieth-century Central Europe and Southeast Asia, we might more profitably have pondered experience much closer to hand-that of contemporary central Eurasia. Instead of wondering how our leaders could have been so misguided we might instead ask, "Didn't they learn anything from the Cold War's end and aftermath?"
Indeed, better insight into communism's collapse would have cautioned against much of our Iraq folly. From the limits of "hard" coercive power and the importance of "soft" ideals and persuasion, to the real costs of "shock therapy" economics and the need to preserve vital state functions after regime change, key lessons have been on offer for over a decade. But because they contradicted triumphalist beliefs about our Cold-War victory, or drew attention to unpleasant details such as the plight of transition's "losers" or the causes of ethnic strife, they were ignored. The Bush Administration has not lacked for officials with Soviet bloc expertise. But so "militarized" was their outlook, and so uninterested have they been in the societal costs of communism's collapse or the problems of nation-building that followed, that they did not heed these critical lessons.
The Cancer of Corruption
Consider, for example, the endemic corruption that has engulfed Iraq and subverts efforts to rebuild the country, provide vital services, and improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis. The single most persistent and pernicious problem across the entire post-communist area-from St. Petersburg to Sarajevo, Bratislava to Bucharest-is the public and private-sector corruption that slows growth, demoralizes the struggling poor and middle-classes, and disillusions ever more once-enthusiastic "Westernizers" in even mostly successful transition states (witness last fall's mass protests in the Hungarian capital of Budapest). In Russia, it was chiefly disgust at the rampant criminalization of the 1990s-the payoffs, racketeering and gangsterism that benefited a choice few "rent-seeking" oligarchs and "insider-trading" bankers while social services and living standards collapsed-that generated broad support for President Vladimir Putin's turn to authoritarian, state-corporatist policies.
Building on the ruins of state socialism, some of this chaos and the consequent anti-market, anti-Western backlash was probably inevitable. But even once-doctrinaire advocates of shock therapy, including some of its architects from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, now admit that their insistence on rapid privatization of state industry and social services-begun without first creating vital legal-regulatory frameworks or safety nets-led to much unnecessary waste, impoverishment and an orgy of corruption. Many non-specialists are surprised to learn that long after communism's collapse most citizens of the successor states live no better, and often much worse, than they did under the old system. From Russia to Romania, poverty, crime and corruption continue to fuel an anti-Western, national-chauvinistic force in politics. And so one is amazed to read in the new Iraq War literature not of competence guided by real-world experience, but of naivety fueled by ideology. Under our Coalition Provisional Authority, befuddled senior Republican loyalists and twenty-something political appointees tinkered with the tax code, designed a utopian private healthcare system and computerized the Baghdad stock exchange while all around them the state was looted, basic social services collapsed, and the country swiftly descended into chaos.
