Matt Yglesias

Friedman: We Need State-Building in the West Bank

Thomas Friedman writes about the idea that building the possibility of an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires substantial capacity-building on the Palestinian side:

That said, once Obama is able to think afresh about the Middle East, he will find that the Bush team has left an interesting legacy here: 140,000 U.S. soldiers doing nation-building in Iraq and one U.S. soldier — actually a three-star U.S. Army general — doing nation-building in the West Bank. We need a better balance. [...]

Palestinians need the same chance. You can’t have a two-state solution without two states, and today the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which still supports a two-state deal, doesn’t have the institutions of a state, particularly an effective police force. Therefore, my hope is that Obama will focus not only on peace plans from the top down, but also on institution-building from the bottom up. The best way to isolate Hamas in Gaza is to build the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank into a decent government with steadily expanding control over its territory.

He goes on to describe a promising initiative in this regard that’s already under way. And it certainly sounds like a good idea to me. But on another level, this goes back to the centrality of the Israeli settlements to the situation. Israel doesn’t just let its citizens wander out into Palestinian land and build houses. It also takes action to protect them. That means a series of security barriers, checkpoints, special no-Arabs-allowed roads, and other restrictions on Palestinian movement. Those are not only inconvenient for ordinary Palestinians and offensive to their dignity, they make it impossible for the Palestinian Authority to exercise effective authority over its territory.

And recall the issue I raised in my “cycle of excuses” post. One needs to recall that the lack of Palestinian Authority efficacy is not just a result of settlement activity, but of a deliberate U.S.-backed Israeli strategy of degrading Palestinian Authority institutional efficacy back in the “isolate Arafat” period. Back then, the U.S. endorsed the view that Israel couldn’t negotiate a final settlement deal until it had finished destroying Fatah’s security organs. Now we’re in danger of endorsing the view that Israel can’t negotiate a deal until we build them back up again. The truth is that we need to move on all these fronts. We need to freeze settlement activity. We need to start working on building Palestinian capabilities. And we need to move forward on finding again on top-down political agreement.

Friedman to Palestinians: Suck on This

America’s leading foreign affairs columnist once again endorses collective punishment of Arabs. I wish he would stick to climate change:

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future. [...] In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.

This in much the same way that Osama bin Laden sought to “educate” American civilians about the price to be paid for supporting corrupt oil monarchies by killing people who happened to be in a prominent skyscraper, and the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade tried to educate Israeli civilians about the cost of occupation with this suicide bombing in Beit Yisrael? Or, I suppose, the United States when firebombing Dresden. As with his repugnant remarks that the point of invading Iraq was to send a “suck on this” message to Arabs everywhere, Friedman is positing a much sicker rationale for military action than its actual initiators have been willing to articulate.

The Enduring Impact of a Bridge

Tom Friedman is surely right to say that investing in our education system would be a good idea. But not only does the specific proposal he makes suffer from the problems Kevin Carey details, but he’s dead wrong about this purported contrast:

Sure, we’ll waste some money doing that. That will happen with bridges, too. But a bridge is just a bridge. Once it’s up, it stops stimulating. A student who normally would not be interested in science but gets stimulated by a better teacher or more exposure to a lab, or a scientist who gets the funding for new research, is potentially the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. They create good jobs for years. Perhaps more bridges can bail us out of a depression, but only more Bills and Steves can bail us into prosperity.

This is totally wrong. A bridge doesn’t “stop stimulating” the economy once it’s done. Well-functioning bridges are integral to economic prosperity. The economic success of Northern Virginia is built in part on a solid foundation of a highly educated workforce. But it’s also built on the fact that there are bridges across the Potomac River. The most important economic impact of the bridges over the river isn’t the immediate job-creation effect that building them had. It’s that first the construction of highway-bridges created the NoVa DC suburbs and second that the construction of rail bridges allowed the creation of the dense corridors of economic activity that shape and define Arlington County.

Right now, the country is suffering tens of billions of dollars in lost economic productivity each year due to traffic congestion in the vicinity of our major metropolitan areas:

Relieving that congestion will due us enormous enduring economic good. And to relieve it, we’ll need new infrastructure. Probably not very many new bridges, as it happens, though we certainly should do repair work on our existing highways and bridges. But new investments in mass transit and freight rail infrastructure will do a lot to mitigate these problems. And combined with state-of-the-art congestion pricing—which, in turn, would require some infrastructure investments to be workable—we could solve the congestion problem and do ourselves a world of good.

This is largely independent of the stimulus question, but insofar as we’re looking to spend money it definitely makes sense to find smart ways to use stimulus funds to kick-start some of the needed activity. That’s not to deny the importance of education. Rather, smart investments in education are in exactly the same basket as smart investments in physical infrastructure—both will help the country enormously over the long-run.