The neocons have learned nothing from five years of catastrophe

Their zealous advocacy of the invasion of Iraq may have been a disaster, but now they want to do it all over again - in Iran

Francis Fukuyama
Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian (UK)

The United States today spends approximately as much as the rest of the world combined on its military establishment. So it is worth pondering why it is that, after nearly four years of effort, the loss of thousands of American lives, and an outlay of perhaps half-a-trillion dollars, the US has not succeeded in pacifying a small country of some 24 million people, much less in leading it to anything that looks remotely like a successful democracy.

One answer is that the nature of global politics in the first decade of the 21st century has changed in important ways. Today's world, at least in that band of instability that runs from north Africa and through the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia, is characterised by numerous weak and sometimes failed states, and by transnational actors who are able to move fluidly across international borders, abetted by the same technological capabilities that produced globalisation. States such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Palestine and a host of others are not able to exercise sovereign control over their territory, ceding power and influence to terrorist groups such as al-Qaida, political parties-cum-militias such as Hizbullah in Lebanon, or various ethnic and sectarian factions elsewhere.

(The rest is here.)