The worst message

Mustache from The Shave Den.

Thomas P. Friedman (better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mustache of Postcolonial Maturity) reminds us that it's not just about us:

The worst message we can send right now to Middle Easterners is that their future is all bound up in what we do. It is not. The Arab-Muslim world has rarely been more complicated and more in need of radical new approaches by us — and them.... [Tom's italics]

And the best way we can help them to take responsibility for their own policies and their own lives, and to start pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps instead of ours, is to give them a very clear set of instructions and then punish them if they get it wrong and reward them if they get it right:

If it were up to me, I’d put Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, in charge of American policy in the Arab-Muslim world. Because we need to phase out of the cold war business of selling arms there to keep “strongmen” on our side and in power, and we need to get into the business of sponsoring a “Race to the Top” in the Arab-Muslim world that, instead, can help empower institutions and strong people, who would voluntarily want to be on our side.

So bold it almost hurts your eyes, huh?

Instead of that old business of distinct budgets for each country from the Pentagon and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we'd have just one big kitty for everybody (excepting Israel, which is so adult we already gave them all our credit cards and car keys).

Then every year each country gets an annual performance review on the principles of results-based accountability: how far have they gotten on privatizing government business, how far they've come with computerizing, how much progress they've made in their multiple-choice test scores. And after the review we give out the prizes: Congratulations, Yemen, that's $4 billion! Sorry, Oman, but your critical thinking scores brought you down.

Because they won't voluntarily want to be on our side if we invite just anybody. And you can't expect people to think for themselves if you won't tell them what to think.

Animatronic Disney elephant. From Woonietest.