Article related to this discussion:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/o...eign-policy-by-whisper-and-nudge.html?hp&_r=0
"Post-cold-war foreign policy today is largely about “affecting the internal composition and governance of states,” added Mandelbaum, many of which in the Middle East are failing and
threaten us more by their collapse into ungoverned regions — not by their strength or ability to project power.
But what we’ve learned in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Syria is that i
t is very hard to change another country’s internal behavior — especially at a cost and in a time frame that the American public will tolerate — because it requires changing a country’s political culture and getting age-old adversaries to reconcile.
The primary foreign policy tools that served us so well in the cold war, said Mandelbaum,
“guns, money, and rhetoric — simply don’t work for these new tasks. It is like trying to open a can with a sponge.”
To help another country change internally requires a mix of refereeing, policing, coaching, incentivizing, arm-twisting and modeling — but even all of that cannot accomplish the task and make a country’s transformation self-sustaining, unless the people themselves want to take charge of the process.
In Iraq, George W. Bush removed Saddam Hussein, who had been governing that country vertically, from the top-down, with an iron fist. Bush tried to create the conditions through which Iraqis could govern themselves horizontally, by having the different communities write their own social contract on how to live together.
It worked, albeit imperfectly, as long as U.S. troops were there to referee. But once we left, no coterie of Iraqi leaders emerged to assume ownership of that process in an inclusive manner and thereby make it self-sustaining."
And here's the money shot, almost exactly what I was talking about over the past couple of days:
Some liberals want to “do something” in places like Libya and Syria; they just don’t want to do what is necessary, which would be a long-term occupation to remake the culture and politics of both places.
And conservative hawks who want to intervene just don’t understand how hard it is to remake the culture and politics in such places, where freedom, equality and justice for all are not universal priorities, because some people want to be “free” to be more Islamist or more sectarian.
