27322: De Verteuil (Opinion) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

pdeverteuil@yahoo.com

My internet newspaper trawl this morning dredged up this quote from the
Washington Post Op Ed piece by Sebastian Mallaby:

"But this only begins to confront Fukuyama's worry, which is that no amount
of tinkering with the apparatus of government will make nation-building
possible. Creating a functional Iraq or Afghanistan REQUIRES CREATING NORMS
OF WORK AND TRUST AND HONNESTY, and such norms can't be conjured by
outsiders, no matter how well organized they are."

In one line, this lays out the basic third world problem facing Haiti.
Functional societies took centuries to create these norms. Maybe - and that
is a big maybe - outsiders (the UN) could conjure them in only a generation
or two.