Excellent article. Buzzfeed is really stepping up its game. There just doesn't seem to be any way for a country like the USA to make much of a positive difference there. Our Middle East policy just falls apart everywhere we do anything.
I agree that good policy would help. But how do you make good policy happen in a place like that? The institutions themselves and many of the people that fill them all have strong incentives towards corruption; that's a big point of this article. Aside from long term occupation and incorporation of the population in foreign institutions, like the British in India, how might we make institutional change happen? What if they don't want it? I'm only saying that there is a point to be made that if the implementation of policy designed to help comes from a foreign source, and we want the policy to actually be followed, the force element still has to be there on the ground. And even then, as this article shows, it can be an abject failure.