A Draft for Peace?

[Reihan] Laurence Kotlikoff's plan for peace in Iraq might strike you as a little quixotic, but it does make a good deal of sense: bribe Iraq's young men into rejecting violence by drafting "all Iraqi men between the ages of 18 and 35" and paying them a handsome wage. I tend to think that Iraq's civil war, like Bosnia's civil war before it, is fundamentally driven by a fear of subjugation -- when those in power have absolute authority, no one wants to be in the dispossessed majority or the despised minority. Does Kotlikoff's plan offer a way out of this trap? Maybe. But of course this is all academic, and tragically so.