realclearworld Newsletters: Mideast Memo

It seems as though everyone has a "Marshall Plan" of sorts to peddle these days. Take, for example, the unlikely duo of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and U2 frontman Bono.

Graham, following a recent trip to the Middle East and North Africa, proposed a new "Marshall Plan" earlier this month to help bolster the faltering Egyptian government of Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, in addition to other governments in the region struggling with crippling refugee crises.

"I was stunned at how things have deteriorated," said Graham during a media briefing in Washington. "If you go to Egypt and don't realize they need some help yesterday, you're making a huge mistake."

Bono, the Irish rocker and longtime philanthropist, echoed Graham's call for Marshall-esque action in testimony before the South Carolina senator's foreign aid appropriations subcommittee, and recounted the hardships and horrors that he too witnessed during recent visits to refugee camps in Kenya, Jordan, and Turkey.

The Marshall Plan "delivered trade and development in service of security -- in places where institutions were broken and hope had been lost," wrote the rock 'n' roll icon in a New York Times op-ed published in complement to his Capitol Hill visit. "Well, hope is not lost in the Middle East and North Africa, not yet, not even where it's held together by string. But hope is getting impatient. We should be, too."

The two gentlemen aren't wrong, not entirely anyway. The refugee crisis has left millions of people displaced both in and outside of Syria, contributing directly to the unmanageable wave of migrants that have washed up on Europe's shores and traversed the Continent's roads and railways in search of safety and stability. This ghastly crisis has broken an entire generation of Syrians, possibly more, and without question demands greater care and commitment from the international community.

Both Graham's and Bono's undoubtedly sincere efforts belie however a deeply flawed understanding of what exactly the Marshall Plan was, and how and why it was so effective at helping Western Europe recover in the years following World War II.

Far from being a mere relief package, the Marshall Plan was designed specifically to return sustainability to a battered part of the world that faced a Soviet military threat almost immediately following the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945. The $13 billion doled out to Europe (and Turkey) between 1948 and 1952 -- about $103 billion adjusted to inflation, less than the cost of reconstruction in Afghanistan -- was intended to buttress already capable industrial economies against the not-so-mutually exclusive threats of poverty, depravity, and communism. The Marshall Planners believed that open markets and greater interdependence among the economies of Western Europe would help ameliorate the underlying animosities and grievances that had repeatedly led the Continent down the path of war and destruction. The plan's boosters had reliable pre-war benchmarks for industrial and agricultural output in Europe, in addition to healthy consumption and comfort levels that existed in the region prior to the disruption of the Second World War. Indeed, throughout much of war-ravaged Western Europe, the conditions for growth and prosperity were already present even before Marshall dollars had been delivered to its recipients.

Why the Middle East Is Different

The same cannot be said, unfortunately, of the Middle East and North Africa. Although the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen have contributed greatly to the region's present economic and governmental failures, the conditions for success were lacking even prior to the United States' destabilizing 2003 invasion of Iraq. Economic output and productivity were already low as compared to other parts of the world, and unemployment was high, particularly among Mideast youth. Corruption and bad governance were rampant, and across the Arab world, the kind of democratic institutions that could be found in pre-World War II Europe were virtually nonexistent.

"We face, as the Marshall Planners did not in their dealings with Western Europe, the challenge of intervening in countries in which ethnic strife is high, democratic traditions are few, and America's presence is a source of suspicion," wrote historian Nicolaus Mills in his 2008 book "Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower."

In Europe, moreover, the Americans could point to countries and cultures that not only shared their values, but to ones that contributed to the development of their own society. As then-President Harry Truman put it, the reconstruction of Europe was "essential to the maintenance of the civilization in which the American way of life is rooted."

While suspicion of German-Americans ran rampant prior to World War II, America's bond to the Continent made it difficult to untether the sufferings of even Germany from those of its own citizens. Germans represented more than 10 percent of the American population at the turn of the 19th century, and men with names like Eisenhower and Nimitz led the campaign against the Axis powers.

Americans simply do not have that same affinity for the Arab world, making an already tough sell even harder for the likes of Bono and Graham. Muslims represent roughly 1% of the present-day American population, as do Arab-Americans. The United States, moreover, has already lost thousands of American lives and spent tens of billions of dollars in effort to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. Convincing the American public that this same part of the world will require even more U.S. money and muscle would likely require a Herculean effort too daunting for perhaps even the inimitable George Marshall.

This is unfortunate, because the needs of the Middle East are many, and the pain being felt across much of the region is very real. None of those problems can be solved, however, by any amount of Western relief thrown at unaccountable and autocratic governments like the one in Cairo.

The problems that plague the Middle East require Middle Eastern solutions, and, more importantly, an end to the violence and national deterioration raging in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. It will demand an amount of cooperation and coordination between Shia and Sunni, Islamist and secularist, and Persian and Arab that simply does not exist today, and no amount of economic planning -- be it Marshall or otherwise -- will change that.

More on this:

Congress Ponders "Marshall Plan" for Egypt -- Al-Monitor

No Marshall Plan for the Middle East -- PRISM

U.S. Outspent the Marshall Plan in Afghanistan -- Foreign Policy

"The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower"

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