Lessons from the bloc.

• Author: English, Robert D.
• Position: Rocky Shoals of Reform - Essay

GIVEN THE ever-worsening news about our failing occupation of Iraq, even devotees of Fox News have to wonder: "Why have we bungled this war so badly?" Readers of the burgeoning literature of Iraq War studies and exposes ask even more pointedly: "How could experienced officials have been so misguided, so incompetent?" But those who follow events in Russia and the former Soviet bloc might pose still another question: "Didn't they learn anything from the Cold War's end and aftermath?" (The Bush Administration has not lacked top officials with Soviet and East European expertise.) Odd as this sounds, especially given the American penchant for ahistorical and compartmentalized treatment of our foreign affairs, a better understanding of communism's collapse would have cautioned against much of our Iraq folly.

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 drains investment, slows growth and disillusions once enthusiastic "Westernizers" in even mostly successful transition states (witness the October 2006 mass protests in the Hungarian capital of Budapest). In Russia, it was chiefly disgust at the rampant criminalization of the 1990s--the pay-offs, racketeering and gangsterism that benefited a choice few rent-seeking bankers and insider-trading oligarchs 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 socialism, some of this chaos and the consequent anti-market, anti-democratic backlash was surely 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 the necessary legal-regulatory frameworks or safety nets--led to much unnecessary destruction and waste, impoverishment, polarization 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. 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.

How could they have failed to heed the previous decade's painful post-communist experience--along with the advice of many Iraq and Middle East experts--and not only repeated, but even magnified all the recent mistakes in transition politics and economics? "Stuff happens", rationalized a dismissive Defense Secretary. Donald Rumsfeld as the chaos grew. Yes it does, particularly when the old system is destroyed with little regard for the difficult work of preparing a new one. Instead, blind faith...