A modest proposal for Middle East peace?

Calculating the various alternative ways the money the United States has spent on Iraq might better have been used has become something of a cottage industry. Scott MacLeod of Time offers a new way to slice it: To sweeten efforts to get Israelis and Palestinians to settle their 60-year dispute, Americans could have written a ...

By , a former managing editor of Foreign Policy.

Calculating the various alternative ways the money the United States has spent on Iraq might better have been used has become something of a cottage industry. Scott MacLeod of Time offers a new way to slice it:

Calculating the various alternative ways the money the United States has spent on Iraq might better have been used has become something of a cottage industry. Scott MacLeod of Time offers a new way to slice it:

To sweeten efforts to get Israelis and Palestinians to settle their 60-year dispute, Americans could have written a check for every Israeli and Palestinian–17 million people–to the tune of $117,000.

(Yes, this is obviously not feasible. But it's interesting.) 

Blake Hounshell is a former managing editor of Foreign Policy.

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