Monday, February 28, 2011

Tilt To Tunisia

SNL once joked that Ronald Reagan wanted to make America proud again by fighting a war, "but with a little country, so we can win." Doyle McManus believes the U.S. should devote its scarce resources to supporting democracy not in Egypt, where problems run too deep, but in an Arab country where the foundation has already been laid:
[Tunisia is] relatively small (about 11 million people). It's a middle-income country, with a per capita national income of about $9,500. Its population is relatively educated; one reason for the revolution was that too many college graduates were unemployed. Its revolution was largely peaceful; it suffers from no major ethnic or sectarian conflicts.

The people of Tunisia were the ones who started this wave of democratization. Now we should help them complete it.

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