Legitimacy's Legacy

After the Cuban revolution, in 1959, the United States infused defense and foreign aid with a new vigor. John F. Kennedy campaigned in 1960 as a cold warrior, and the following year he proclaimed a "development decade" in a speech in front of the United Nations. His assertiveness was compounded by the economic exuberance of the times. Cars sported extravagant tail fins; McDonald's was reinventing restaurants; American entrepreneurs and intellectuals were the world's smartest. Of course Kennedy's whiz kids could contain communist expansion. Of course they could triumph over global poverty.

The echoes of our time are unmistakable -- and, in an unexpected way, revealing.

After al Qaeda's attacks, in 2001, George W. Bush infused defense and foreign aid with an equally fresh vigor. He became an anti-terror warrior, and the following year he promised a huge jump in aid on the eve of a United Nations summit. His assertiveness was compounded by economic exuberance, too: Despite the Internet bust, a decade of extraordinary technology-fueled growth had enlarged America's idea of what was possible. Like Kennedy before him, Bush surrounded himself with brilliant and unhumble lieutenants. For Robert McNamara, the charismatic CEO who ran Kennedy's Pentagon, substitute chief executive Donald Rumsfeld. For McGeorge Bundy, the Harvard dean who served as Kennedy's national security adviser, substitute provost Condoleezza Rice of Stanford.

We all know the fate of Kennedy's hubris in the military sphere. It led to Vietnam, a war that was right in the sense that the Iraq war is right: It was about standing up to a dictatorial regime with a threatening anti-American ideology. But the Vietnam War was simultaneously wrong. It was perceived as illegitimate -- by Vietnamese nationalists, by America's allies and ultimately by Americans. As a result, it was unwinnable.

The fate of Kennedy's ambition in foreign aid is less well-known but just as interesting. Over the next three decades, aid bureaucrats escalated the battle against poverty, applying the same technocratic rationalism that led America to underestimate the importance of legitimacy in Vietnam. The parallel was no coincidence: A key architect of the buildup was McNamara, who left the Pentagon in 1968 to preside over the World Bank, where he spent more than a decade. During the McNamara 1970s, the bank's lending tripled and the scope of its efforts expanded at an imperialistic rate. In the 1980s the bank tried to fix the poor world with the package of technocratic economic prescriptions known as structural adjustment.

In the 1990s, however, the World Bank and other agencies woke up. Their technical prescriptions had been right, but they had often failed because they'd been viewed as illegitimate. McNamara's ambitious rural development projects looked good on paper, but the bank failed to win peasants' support for the new irrigation systems and feeder roads, so both decayed for lack of maintenance. It was the same story with structural adjustment. The bank and its allies were right to tell countries to cut their budget deficits and allow their currencies to fall to a competitive level. But Latin Americans and Africans did not view prescriptions from Washington as politically legitimate. As a result, they were frequently not implemented.

So the aid folk -- at least, the thoughtful ones -- discarded their hubris. They accepted that you can't ram development ideas down people's throats, however right and rational those ideas are. This is why the Bush administration's expanded aid program -- the one announced on the eve of the U.N. summit two years ago -- will be spent in a few countries where sensible policies have been adopted already and enjoy popular support. The aid people have grasped the importance of legitimacy.

Which brings us to Iraq. In a technocratic sense, the war was right: Saddam Hussein was an America-hating monster. But the war, unfortunately, enjoys little legitimacy. We are not back in the Vietnam era, when demonstrating students enthusiastically waved posters of America's enemy, Ho Chi Minh. But there's a sense that the Iraq war violated the principles America is admired for. This country stands for the rule of law, but the Bush policy of unilateral preemption appears lawless. This country stands for the democratic conviction that a broad cacophony of voices must be heard, however much that slows the wheels of government. But in the lead-up to Iraq, the Bush team treated international opinion contemptuously. And in assembling the provisional authority in Iraq, it thought it could sideline awkward but powerful voices such as that of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

This was a mistake. The lesson the aid people learned applies to global strategy as well: Legitimacy is crucial. Precisely because American ideals have triumphed and authoritarianism has been discredited -- precisely because no demonstrating students wave posters of Hussein -- America needs broad popular consent for its actions.

Everyone should pray for American success in Iraq, and it's too early to pronounce success impossible. But our troubles there are paradoxically the product of our success. America won the contest against communism because its ambition is not to rule the world but to create a world of rules; it is not simply to be right but to stand up for the rights of others. You cannot win the Cold War on the strength of these ideals, then expect to win in Iraq by ignoring them.

mallabys@washpost.com