From the Times of London: Neocons done but right

How can anyone argue that getting rid of tyrants and establishing democracy is a bad thing? Not me. Not Jimmy Carter who originally pushed this idea but without George W. Bush's fascination for playing war. Saying that neo-con policy was a good thing omits discussing the question of means justifying ends.

First, that you can, simply by the exercise of military and other forms of hard power, bring the blessings of liberal democracy to any part of the world. And secondly that, as matter of national security exigency, you should strive to do just that since only a world of liberal democracies will in the end guarantee peace and stability. Iraq doesn’t, it must be admitted, look good on either count.

The US has failed to bring real democracy there, despite losing more than 3,000 troops and spending more than $500 billion. An election or two won’t really cut it — there is nothing civil about the society that now exists in Iraq.

The second count looks even worse. The attempt to push for democracy in Iraq has clearly not been in the US national interest, has not made things more peaceful and stable. The democracy that exists after a fashion in the region — in the Palestinian territories, say, or in Pakistan — doesn’t bode too well for the idea of peace and stability, either.

Some neocons continue to defend the Iraq war on the ground that the idea was right but the execution was disastrous. This blames everything on Donald Rumsfeld, and, increasingly, on George Bush, for not providing resources for the struggle commensurate with the challenge.

This is not really honest. While few would deny that the Bush Administration has produced a textbook example of how not to pursue regime change, most of those who now criticise the White House were not sounding a warning four years ago, when Baghdad fell, that the US needed a vast increase in its commitment.

A more honest judgment would have to be that neoconservatives and their sympathisers — yes, me — badly underestimated the scale of difficulty of effecting radical change in a country such as Iraq. It’s no good blaming either Bush-Rumsfeld or Iraqis themselves. The fact is, the war’s opponents had it right when they said the US would not be able to pull that brutalised, fractious country into the community of civilised states.

I find incredible the writer's description of all this and its accompanying death, destruction, and ruin as merely an "error of judgment." However, take a read of the whole article and see how the neo-con argument proved itself worthless.