Bret Devereaux

Analysis from libertarian CATO Institute shows fault lines in conservatism on the War on Terrorism (working on an article): “Why would the sort of people who think government is too ham-handed even to promote modest social engineering goals like safe-sex among teenagers, think...

we can promote a revolution in Islamic theology via AC-130 gunship or create a bourgeois society where no preconditions for it exist?”

I mean, right or wrong (mostly wrong) the answer to that question is pretty obvious: after the breakup of the USSR led to the creation of many democratic states, the conclusion that many thinkers in the west reached was that everyone wanted democratic governments...

...and that the major obstacle to those kinds of governments (and the relative prosperity and safety they tend to bring) were the existing repressive regimes. So that if only the door to democracy could be opened (by the AC-130), the populace would walk through it...

...forming stable, Eastern-European style democracies that mostly were able to fairly rapidly improve their economies and standard of living (more Poland, less Russia), leading to an overall decline in violence and instability which would benefit US interests in the region.

Now of course, rooted in broader history, that seems silly and a wider vision might have seen that autocracy, not democracy is the 'base state' of government, a gravity that democracies defy only with effort. But the train of logic wasn't all that mysterious.