In 1997, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, led by Gregory Fossedal, published a study of how the Marshall Plan worked and found three strong policy correlates with national recovery: monetary stabilization, tax reform/rate reduction and implementation of free-trade policies. Creating economic prosperity in Central Asia and the Middle East today will also require these kinds of fundamental policy reforms. A reconstruction program must be based on a combination of economic aid and policy liberalization in the countries that participate: free trade, sound money and stable exchange rates, private property rights, tax policies that do not stifle initiative and sensible spending policies that make only necessary public investments.
The president should appoint a special envoy to serve under Gen. Jay Garner, either from an appropriate Cabinet department or a leading businessperson from the private sector with an interest and the experience to help form a plan for growth and prosperity at the earliest possible date. The envoy should have no other responsibility but to move this program to completion and should have complete power and authority to do so across all appropriate federal departments and agencies.
Skeptics of Marshall Plan analogies for the Middle East say we can't repeat history. Actually, leaders can do little but repeat history. In the coming months, the United States will decide whether it wants to repeat the history of 1945-47, with piecemeal aid programs and unambitious goals, or whether we want to repeat the history of 1947-55, and make an entire region of the world peaceful, prosperous, democratic and free. The latter is a history well worth repeating for the world's most devastated region at the start of the 21st century.
Iraq, like Europe, has many physical assets, including its vast oil reserves, to build on. Most important, however, are its human assets - a population that is well-educated, skilled at trading and production, and which understands nearly as much about freedom and democracy as Germans did in 1947. The Iraqi people, as President Bush recognizes, have a deep yearning for these things, whether some Western elites think they are "ready" for democracy or not. All human beings are "ready" for democracy, freedom and equality; they are a part of human nature.