contrary to those waxing nostalgic for Saddam or swooning over Egypt’s Sisi, perhaps next time we can recall that it is these dictators that have spawned the extremist opposition that now threatens Americans and Europeans at home. Isn’t the right answer a more robust form of autonomy and federalism, in which groups that aim for self government have some hope of achieving it? Isn’t the answer a group of federalized, representative governments that allocates shared resources justly, rather than on the basis of ethnic and sectarian cronyism?
She wrote that before the Paris attacks, but those reinforced her views. I see elements of wishful thinking there, but that is hard to avoid when coming up with an endgame for the Middle East that sounds positive.
Suppose that the people in the Middle East are not capable of moving to her preferred endgame at the moment. We might want to think through the pros and cons of a different endgame, or midgame: an American military protectorate in what are now the most disorderly parts of the region. Instead of providing asylum to refugees in the United States, we would provide asylum in place.
There would be no democracy under this protectorate. However, the American military rulers would respect individual rights, including property rights. The protectorate would be run using what I call the Basic Social Rule: reward cooperators, punish defectors. If you show that you want to live in peace and work for a living, you are a cooperator. Otherwise, you are not.
There is a joke that what Israel and the Palestinians need are three states: one for the Jews, one for the Palestinians, and one for the people who want to kill each other. The truth hidden in the joke is that the vast majority of people just want to live their lives. The goal of the protectorate is to protect such people from the militants who want to kill for their ideology. The latter would be killed or deported from the areas under the protectorate.
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