According to the New York Times, a donors’ conference in Paris today pledged a record $7.4 billion of aid for the embattled Palestinian Authority over the next three years. That’s a big number, and it is intended to support critical government functions in the Palestinian territories, while jump-starting economic growth to help provide Palestinians with a tangible “peace dividend.”

As observers of the conflict have learned by now, there is a direct and critical correlation between political stability and economic growth, so that neither can last long without the other. I hope, in particular, that the latest infusion of charity to the Palestinian territories will be quickly followed by for-profit investment, especially from wealthy Arab states, demonstrating the concrete benefits of stability to Palestinians, and helping to deflate the bloated state bureaucracy by offering attractive private sector employment. (more…)

The “Pottery Barn Principle” has tremedous informal influence in the on-going debate about what to do in Iraq. The quick summary is incredibly evocative: “you broke it, you bought it” applies in international affairs, just as it does at Pottery Barn and other stores. So the U.S. “owns” the Iraq problem and can’t leave until stability and happiness return to the land.

Of course, the principle is rarely enforced at stores like Pottery Barn. Nice stores understand in advance that they have fragile displays, with glasses stacked in precarious poses to make them look nice for potential customers. So the owners and managers expect some glasses to break from time to time. And the stores focus on making the unfortunate customer who accidentally bumps into the wine glass display while backing away to get a different perspective on the beautiful $800 console table feel comfortable enough to come back to the store — or perhaps even to buy the console table that very day. Other customers don’t turn and stare and clap and otherwise humiliate the unfortunate, clumsy person, as they would do in a high school cafeteria. Nice stores are much more grown up and understanding.

Yet the analogy still holds strange power in the foreign policy debate. Many Americans really have a deep streak of responsibility. The U.S. “owes” something to Cambodia, to Guatemala, to the Philippines. As a country, we don’t always act on our guilt, but sometimes we do, and there’s a deep reservoir of support that prioritizes efforts to improve the lives of people that the U.S. had something to do with harming over efforts simply to help people. Many Americans want to do good in the world, and that matters; the impulse to do good tinged with the guilt of having done ill in the past matters even more.

But how much sense does that make? Even in the moral framework, I think it’s tough to make the case for the pottery barn principle. (more…)

Mark Bowden had a smart op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal about why violence continues in Iraq. It’s unfortunately only available by subscription, but here’s a key excerpt:

Saddam had long since ceased to be the beloved figure he believed himself to be. In this stubborn insurgency there has been little evidence of him as a rallying point. His death did not provoke violent recriminations or even much angry rhetoric. Once he was toppled, once deprived of his vicious state apparatus, he ceased to be relevant. Just as the resistance never stopped or even slowed after his capture, the deaths of his sons or the arrests or killings of the other leading Baathist figures on the notorious U.S. military deck of cards, it will not be affected by his death. Saddam was bigger than the bloody divisions that now preoccupy his people. None of the various murderous factions are fighting for his vision of a greater Iraq. The Sunnis are fighting to resist Shiite domination, the Shiites to rid themselves of Sunni oppression, and the Islamists just to frustrate the democratic vision of the U.S.

We Americans consistently underestimate the deep hatreds that divide people. Our political system is designed to wrestle peacefully with the divisions of race, class, ethnicity, religion and competing ideological or geographical interests, and has generally worked as intended — the Civil War being the one glaring exception. Generations have struggled to live up to ideals of tolerance and diversity. When we look out at the world, we tend to see millions longing to get past the blood feuds, to be, in short, more like us. George Bush and the neocon intellectuals who led us into Iraq are just the latest in a long line of evangelical Americanists. No matter how many times history slaps us in the face, the dream persists.

This is a point that I have blogged about before — that peaceful settlement of sectarian disputes comes through acceptance of a political process (see a blog entry, here). We have a process that more or less works in the United States; war-torn countries like Iraq (and Lebanon and Somalia) do not. And the locals in those countries have to get tired of fighting and to see that they are unlikely to achieve their goals through fighting before they will make the political decisions needed to resolve disputes another way. No amount of American power can insulate Iraqis (or Lebanese or Somalis, etc.) from that fact.