News from Around the World

As I think about this, I’m reminded of something Bill Clinton once said about debt releif: No one talks about it, because no one will lose an election for not talking about it. This seems to be kind of the same issue. Hard as I try, I can’t locate a domestic political constituency that would united behind an issue like this. This is a fundamental weakness of Bush’s global-democratization strategy: The sacrifices we’d have to make for it to work, in terms of setting a moral example for the world, benefit other nations but get voted on by us. This is not to say that Americans are too selfish to vote for someone else’s wellbeing. The problem is that they don’t know whether something is beneficial to someone else’s wellbeing, because they observe the same local world whether it gets done or not. No American will ever suffer, at least directly and in the short-term, if we fail to promote a culture of accountability in Iraq. As a result, there’s just no bloc of voters that punishes politicians for welching on their obligations to other people.