Original Blog Reporting
INDCJournal and Michael Totten are both doing original reporting in Iraq and Lebannon respectively. Some great stuff that you won’t see anywhere else, take a look and support their efforts if you are so inclined.
One thing that I have gotten from both of those accounts is a continued feel that the real hydra we have to fight in promoting democracy in the mid-east isn’t sectarian hatred, but good old fashioned patronage and corruption. This is not to say of course that those sectarian hatreds don’t exist, but that a huge amount of the fuel that drives them is a result of corruption, and fighting corruption is probably the most effective strategy forward.
Of course that isn’t going to be dramatic or sexy, and certainly isn’t easy. I wonder though if there are not lessons from our own history we can learn. Clearly the U.S. has had times and places where corruption is rampant (and I don’t mean the last Republican Congress, that is small potatoes compared to a lot of what we have been through.) The most famous example is probably the Tammany Hall political machine in New York. While I am conversant with the overall shape of that period in history, I must admit that I don’t know what caused it to fail and how we were eventually able to establish much less corrupt systems. I expect that this lack of knowledge is fairly common.
