Robert
D. English, “Lessons from the Bloc”, National
Interest, (September-October 2007), no. 91.
Perhaps it is a conceit of American’s 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 triumphs 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 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.
How could they not
have foreseen this breakdown surely the most consequential failure of our
entire Iraq escapade? How could they have failed to heed the previous decade’s
painful post-communist experience (along with the advice of many Iraq and
Mideast 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 and instead blind faith is placed in the
gratitude of the liberated masses and the magic of the free market. The initial
blunder of disbanding the Iraqi army and dismissing thousands of experienced
managers in a sweeping de-bathification has been acknowledged. But a larger critique of numerous other
reconstruction failures from vast corruption in the oil industry, and the
diversion of millions of dollars from unsupervised rebuilding projects, to the
pay-offs that permeate everything from small business to national politics still
awaits. Perversely, such criticism was long deflected by the charge that it is
anti-Arab or stereotypes
Iraq as culturally
unsuited to free-market democracy. Yet it is simply realistic, and far more
sympathetic, to appreciate that any long-tyrannized society could not adapt to
Western political-economic models overnight. Imagine how much greater would
have been the disorientation and chaos in Russia had it undertaken shock
therapy not after Mikhail
Gorbachev’s liberalizing perestroika in the 1980s, but rather in the 1950s,
immediately after two decades of Josef Stalin’s terrorized totalitarianism? Yet
in key respects that was just the situation confronting post-Saddam Iraq in
2003.
Ethnic
and Religious Complications: Except that it was further complicated by two
other factors the dislocation of war and the cleavages of sharp ethnic,
religious and tribal differences. Thus it was not only the comparatively mild
transition woes of Hungary or Poland that should have been studied, but the
bitter experience of war-torn Bosnia, Kosovo or Tajikistan that might have induced
more caution. Of course there were signs of this danger, and it restrained the
first Bush Administration from toppling Saddam Hussein in 1991. Yet even if the
second Bush Administration somehow convinced itself that the likelihood of
Sunni- Shia-Kurdish conflict was exaggerated, they ought to have considered the
Serb-Croat-Bosnian bloodletting that followed the collapse of Yugoslav central
authority in 1990, or the Pashtun-Tajik-Uzbek warlordism that ensued after the
fall of the Soviet-backed Afghan government in 1992. Mention of Yugoslavia and
Afghanistan highlights yet another post-communist lesson that was ignored
namely, the danger of sudden regime change when there are not only sharp
regional, economic or cultural cleavages present, but where there is also no
critical mass of citizens who identify themselves as members of a common
community or nationality. In other words, where the country is simply not a
unified nation-state. Yugoslavia, as we should have learned, was one such
country, and so are Iraq and Afghanistan, as we are painfully realizing today.
Yet the lessons of Yugoslavia’s collapse were
ignored in an arrogant disdain of Clinton-era foreign-policy experience, and
the lessons of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan were mostly incomprehensible to a neoconservative
ideology that brooked no parallel between Kremlin imperialism and American
liberation. But for all its brutality and revolutionary goals, the original Soviet-backed Afghan
government pursued some of the same reforms that the anti-Taliban American campaign
would swiftly embrace in particular, the liberation of women through equal
educational and political rights and loosening the hold of the conservative
Mullahs over the rural population. And it was popular backlash against such
secularizing reforms not, as
the neoconservative narrative has it, simply the fact of a Soviet-sponsored
regime in Kabul that helped fuel the mujaheddin rebellion in the first place.
One need not equate Soviet and American goals in Afghanistan to appreciate that
there were important cultural, not just military, lessons to be gleaned from
Moscow’s decade-long occupation. As for those military lessons, it is true that
our reliance on indigenous warlord-based forces to do most of our fighting in
ousting the Taliban was tactically brilliant. But was empowering these
opium-dealing power barons in Afghanistan or our own long-run strategic
interests?
It was also
largely taboo, at least until much later, to point out that the oppressive
Taliban regime was to a great extent the product of our own cynical abandonment
of that heavily armed, war-torn country once it had served its purpose of
bleeding Moscow into an ignominious retreat. Only when Afghanistan again became
a U.S. security interest did we again embrace the cause of the long-suffering
Afghan people. So is it any surprise that the warlords see their future not in
cooperating with President Hamid Karzai to build a unified, democratic country
but instead in strengthening their regional power bases and simply outlasting
the latest American commitment? And given the evident failures of the current
U.S.-led effort to bring stability and economic revival, is it any surprise
that many ordinary Afghans today welcome a resurgent Taliban?
Iraq:
America’s Chechnya? Sadly,
so far has the situation in Iraq deteriorated that it may be the brutalized
Russian region of Chechnya that now offers the most important lessons. Again,
while many will reject the comparison, it is not the origins of the conflict
but the present condition of the rebellious Caucasian republic after more than
a decade of efforts to pacify it that is at issue. After Chechen insurgents
battled Russian forces to a humiliating draw over 1994-1996, a ceasefire (and
de facto independence) brought no calm as the republic sank into a morass of
feuding clans, criminal gangs, and Islamic fundamentalism. Attacks and
hostage-taking raids into neighboring Russian territory grew until Putin
decided to reinvade in 1999 (suspicion remains strong that the apartment
bombings that provided the casus belli were staged by Russian forces, but
undisputed acts of Chechen terrorism were also numerous). Chechnya today is a
festering wound, a shattered society whose continued occupation radicalizes the
larger Caucasus region but withdrawal from which Moscow fears would encourage
more separatism and bolder terrorist attacks. What lessons might this hold for
the United States in Iraq.
First, it warns of the criminalization that
relentlessly undermines stability, much less hopes for democracy. When not only
politics and business but everyday life are permeated with bribe-taking and
payoffs from the courts and schools to housing and healthcare then the
occupier’s struggle for hearts and minds is in desperate straits. Second, when rival political parties are
supplanted by rival sectarian groups, which in turn break down into rival
paramilitaries and criminal gangs, then warlordism has trumped the national and
even religious cause and the odds of reconciliation grow very long. Chechnya
today endures an ongoing normalization where the brutality and corruption of the occupiers rivals that of the
insurgents, where the young and ambitious seek a better life abroad, and those
who remain are nominally ruled by the warlord-cum-president Ramzan Kadyrov (the
Moscow-backed strongman who succeeded his assassinated father, Akhmad).
Iraq (and, to some extent, Afghanistan) show
disturbing similarities from the fragmentation of opposition groups and their
incipient mutation from national-sectarian parties into organized-criminal
warlords, to the mismanagement and corruption of reconstruction monies. So far
has the situation slipped from the occupiers control that many of the millions
allocated for stabilizing job-creation and rebuilding efforts are not just
wasted, but actually serve to undermine stability by their misappropriation (to
favor one feuding faction over another) or diversion (to fund or even arm rival
groups). Worse, an inability to halt communal violence leads to ever-more
ethnic cleansing and a
brain drain abroad that, as it did in
post-communist states such as Bosnia, could leave the remaining population so
vengeful and so bereft of its most educated and moderate groups that the
chances of postwar reconciliation and revival grow even more remote. Putin has in
fact achieved a certain success in pacifying Chechnya, but only at a price in
lives, resources and reputation that the United States simply cannot pay (and
with a margin of public support that Bush can only envy). Of course, our tasks
in Iraq (and Afghanistan) are also much more difficult not just to neutralize a
secessionist challenge and suppress a terrorist threat in a small, contiguous
republic, but to build stable, independent countries in vast lands distant from
the United States.
Popular
Backlash and Elite Disillusion: Singularly
focused on regime change, and little interested in the societal costs of the
prolonged and painful transitions that ensue, our policymakers appear
chronically unable to grasp the popular resentment and backlash that naturally
follow. Why are so many former Soviet citizens and not only Russians nostalgic
for the USSR? Why don’t Russians protest the crackdown on entrepreneurial
businessmen (the oligarchs who looted their country) instead of backing the
authoritarian Putin (who at least arrested Russia’s fragmentation and pays
their salaries or pensions on time)? Why do so many Russians admire the
genocidal Stalin (and so many Iraqis recall a better life under the ruthless
Saddam Hussein)? Because for today’s Russians, mention of genocide evokes not
the terror of the 1930s but the misery of the 1990s, when literally millions of
premature deaths caused by disease and malnutrition, alcohol and drugs, or
murder and suicide resulted directly from the poverty, disorder and despair of
transition. These numerous private tragedies are not so dramatic as Stalin’s
(or Saddam’s) political killings, but they are the contemporary, not
historical, experience of countless ordinary Russians. Genocide may not be the
proper term for Russia’s demographic disaster, implying as it does the
premeditated destruction of a people. But it is our complacency about this
tragedy and our share of responsibility for it—that leads many Russians to
use exactly that word for what they see as a deliberate Western policy of
crippling their once-great country. And so in Iraq, as many thousands of excess
deaths accumulate (over
and above the numbers that Saddam regularly killed) as a more-or-less direct
result of the chaos we unleashed, U.S. officials downplay or divert
responsibility for the carnage while more and more ordinary Iraqis conclude
that it was indeed all about oil and military bases, not liberation.
Returning to the former communist region and
examining the attitudes not just of transition’s losers but of the more fortunate educated,
professional classes we still find a similar gulf between local attitudes and
America’s self-perception. Take the case of Russia, where for decades members
of the intelligentsia were
inspired to quiet reformism or even open dissidence by the ideals of postwar
America a country that stood for openness and the rule of law, defense of human
rights, and a principled fight against injustice in a foreign policy notable
for multilateral cooperation with other liberal democracies. Today, however,
pro-American voices in Moscow are few and not only because of the U.S. role in
abetting Russia’s collapse in the 1990s. In Russia and Eastern Europe too, many
former liberal allies are distressed by the bald cynicism of our foreign policy
insisting on the handover to international tribunals of others accused war
criminals while exempting ourselves from the International Criminal Court,
rejecting environmental protections such as Kyoto, selectively violating rules
of international trade and tarnishing our reputation for honesty via such
practices as the flagrant distortion of intelligence, the concealment of
illegal extraordinary renditions and the unprecedented manipulation of the news media at home and abroad.
While we tell ourselves that it is the injured pride of an ex-superpower that
has caused the defection of so
many once-liberal figures or simply Putin’s repression of democratic Russia many once staunchly pro-American figures
have in fact turned away from the United States in a considered response to the
perceived betrayal of our own liberal principles.
Pro-democracy forces in the former USSR are also
weakened by our double standard of faulting Russia’s restrictions on the press
or political activism while keeping quiet about nascent totalitarianism in
certain resource-rich central Asian states (such as Turkmenistan) or the fully
fledged dynastic rule in a key Caspian-basin ally (Azerbaijan). The relentless
expansion of NATO in violation of commitments made at the end of the Cold War has
provoked just the backlash that its opponents predicted. And the cynicism if
not outright dishonesty at so many levels of U.S. policy further erodes our
credibility, from the respect accorded State Department reports to trust in our
international media such as the Voice of America. Similar examples are legion,
but perhaps none reflects how far our moral stock has fallen more than our
post-9/11 embrace of torture something whose practice in Soviet prisons and
psychiatric hospitals galvanized anti-communist opinion like nothing else
during the late Cold War. Use of the same Abu Ghraib prison once employed by
Saddam’s torturers for America’s most brutal interrogations in Iraq summons a
bitter irony perhaps obvious only to veteran human-rights activists namely, of
the similar recycling of infamous tsarist or monarchist prisons and camps by
the secret polices of Stalin, Tito, and other communist dictators.
Forgotten
Lessons of our Cold War Victory: Current
U.S. foreign-policy practices are of course far from the systematic cruelty and
disinformation of Soviet-era communist authorities. But much of the world sees
in them mainly a difference of degree, not kind. Such policies not only
diminish our international influence, they also betray a lack of understanding of
the principles that gave us the high ground and the authority to lead the
liberal-democratic West through decades of Cold War struggle. Such ideological
disarmament in the midst of
global crises, the squandering of our hard-won quotient of what in today’s
parlance is known as soft power, is only comprehensible when we realize how one-sided and militarized is
the neoconservative view of how we triumphed in the last great global struggle.
In their version, the United States prevailed in the Cold War thanks to its
hard powerwe practiced containment
(it should have been rollback by the
way), we met Soviet expansionism with armed force, and in the end we ratcheted
up an arms race that left a cash-strapped Gorbachev no choice but to
capitulate. End of story.
Nowhere in this tale do there appear the decades
of patient diplomacy that engaged the USSR, that doggedly opened a crack in a
closed society and courted its young intellectuals, that not only showed ours
as a dynamic system that out-competed them abroad but also impressed them with
its commitment at home to everything from racial equality and environmental
protection to decency and openness in politics. Cold War cultural exchanges,
academic cooperation, and painstaking arms control talks (all derided by American
hardliners at the time) in fact helped to nurture a post-Stalin generation of
intellectuals, scientists, economists and foreign-policy analysts who formed a
nascent group of within system
reformers in many cases, within the Communist Party itself. And when, in the
early-mid 1980s, the Soviet system faltered, these scholars and policy analysts
emerged as an influential Westernizing lobby that encouraged an open-minded new leader on the path of
perestroika, the path of reforming, humanizing, and integrating Soviet society
with the rest of the world.
Of course the arms race exacerbated Soviet
economic woes and helped persuade an aging Politburo to gamble on the untested
but energetic young Gorbachev. But that is only half of the Cold War-ending
equation, for without the preceding decades of détente, of steady persuasion
and quiet preparation for liberalizing reforms, a different Soviet leader following
different, confrontational policies could have taken the USSR in a very
different direction. The Cold War could well have had a far more difficult and
violent ending. Yet whether out of ignorance or a tendency to emphasize
proximate over distant causes, and to inflate our own role in events over the
contribution of others the standard American view of the Cold War’s end
stresses the role of hard military power and economic pressure to the
near-exclusion of the soft power of ideas and persuasion. Not only the
neoconservative Vulcans who
pushed to invade Iraq, but also most of the realists who now seek an exit, recollect a Cold War
triumph that celebrates only the military build-up and anti-communist resolve
of Ronald Reagan. Gorbachev’s idealism and principled non-intervention as well
as the skilled leadership that kept powerful Soviet hardliners at bay are
barely an afterthought.
Some, given to psychological interpretation,
diagnose in today’s neoconservatives a deep-seated need for enemies and longing
for another epoch-defining global struggle like the Cold War. Perhaps, but it
is enough to understand that many others simply drew flawed lessons from the
Cold War’s end. Neither should it surprise us then that, having triumphed,
their belief in across-the-board American superiority was largely uninterested
in the full aftermath of that victory, namely the manifest failings of the
Washington Consensus model when transplanted to shattered, culturally distinct,
ethnically divided societies. We won the titanic struggle with communism, we
freed an entire region from tyranny, and it is only their fault if they have turned
our gift of free-market democracy into corruption and instability. More often,
however, the dark side of transition was just ignored. So when another major
global challenge arose, the operative lessons were: Hard power is what really
matters; allies are to be commanded and not consulted; concern for image and
ideals only hampers our freedom of action; and the post-regime change will take
care of itself. This is the neoconservatism that set its sights on another
troubled world region, celebrated another military triumph (Mission
accomplished, declared President Bush), dismissed early signs that something
had gone very wrong (Democracy is messy lectured Defense Secretary Rumsfeld) and keeps faith with its historic
mission by a near-Orwellian trick of turning bad news into good (“War and
violence are the birth pangs of a new Mideast, said Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice).
So the answer to question posed at the outset
Didn’t they learn from the Cold War’s end and aftermath?is that in fact they did. Bush Administration
planners indeed drew certain lessons from communism’s collapse that in turn
shaped their approach to Iraq and the larger Middle East. Unfortunately, those
lessons were exceedingly narrow and one-sided. Celebrating the triumph of
American military power, and chanting a mantra of free-market miracles, they
ignored equally important but ideologically inconvenient lessons about the
critical power of ideas in shaping politics, the vital role of the state in
managing transition, and the considerable weight of history and culture.
Even today’s emboldened strategic debate about Iraq is mainly limited to tactical
adjustments in our conduct of the war. Precisely because it mostly omits a
larger re-evaluation of our overall grand strategy in world affairs from an
over-reliance on hard power, to soft-power efforts that are weak at best and
tragicomic at worst (e.g., Bush advisor Karen Hughes much-publicized but
soon-forgotten tour of Islamic countries) it retains the ideological blinders
that guarantee further diminution of our global leadership. So long as we
refuse to shed them, these dogmas not only erode our influence with traditional
allies, and endanger our success in the vital but still-unsettled
post-communist region, they also promise continued failure and growing backlash
in our grand project to remake the Middle East. Even the more modest goal of creating a stable regional ally in Iraq is
fast fading, thanks in part to the same mistakes that helped dash earlier hopes
of nurturing a strong pro-American partner in post-Soviet Russia. The costs of
imperial hubris will remain high for decades to come.
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