You're drifting off the reservation. I thought it was all about Bushie incompetence. Truly competent leadership (John Kerry!) could fix ethnic strife in a trice.

Goolsbee's column reminds me of something I think Tyler Cowen pointed to after Katrina: that prospects for rebuilding a city depend ultimately on whether the city was growing economically before catastrophe. The fundamentals for growth (or peace) are not altered by the catastrophe, costly as that may be.

"never" goes away? "Never"? Yeah, look at how completely unable Italy is to function. Those Etruscans, Vandals, and Romans will never be able to share a nation! In the US, it appears unlikely that the Indian Wars will restart any time soon. The Maoris aren't a big threat in Wellington. The German states seem to get along OK, and the Spanish.

Ethnic divides can persist, but there's no neccessity for it, and you can totally build nations despite a little racial antipathy (Taiwan, the Baltic states, the UK, and India all spring to mind).

You're drifting off the reservation. I thought it was all about Bushie incompetence.

I'm not sure its all about it, but its definitely a great part of it. Everyone with a clue warned of this possibility pre-war. Our Great Leader could not tell the differnce between a Shia and a Sunni, and yet wanted to transform the whole ME

If I were Bush and my advisors had come to me insisting that taking down Saddam would lead to a democratic Iraq, I would have asked the following question: "Can you name a single state in the world that has Iraq's level of ethnic/religious fractionalization and also relies on a single natural resource for much of its economic wealth that is also a democracy?"

It is the fragmentation and ethnic hatred....
There are some groups of expat Iraqis that are working towards promotion of democracy and human rights in Iraq.For the challenges faced by the expat Iraqi community see this article by Ariel Ahram in the Middle East review of international affairs (Meria) journal

http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2005/issue1/jv9no1a6.html

My memory is a bit fuzzy but I was under the impression that many studies have found a correlation between conflict and poor economic performance (e.g., Paul Collier, et al). Isn't there something called the "conflict trap"? Studies that only look at Vietnam or Europe may not really capture the effect of conflict on economic performance. The point is that I am not sure this NYT article truly captures the literature on this subject.

If it was "straight-edged" it would be easier, wouldn't it?

Hesbolla fires one artillery shell with a sarin-filled tip into Israel. Israel fires one artillery shell with a sarin-filled tip into Beirut. At least they wouldn't be WMD's, would they?

Vanity, vanity. Honesty, honesty.

Thank you.

There are deep ethnic divisions in the old East Block that I was sure were going to erupt, but didn't. I was expecting things similar to the Bosnian situation to erupt with the Hungarians of western Rumania and the Turks in Bulgaria, but it hasn't happened.

I don't know if the apparent comity in those nations can be attributed to prosperity though. I admit I haven't looked into it, but I never hear of Bulgaria or Rumania being touted as economic success stories, like you sometimes hear about Hungary. In fact, one of the most prosperous of the ethnically amalgamated ex-east block nations, Czechoslovakia, split, albeit amicably.