David Brooks in today’s New York Times epitomizes what’s wrong with the dominant thinking about the fix we are in with respect to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East:

It was U.S. inaction against Al Qaeda that got us into this mess in the first place. It was our tolerance of Arab autocracies that contributed to the madness in the Middle East.

Inaction? It takes an amazing ignorance of the history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East to even think of that word in this context. (For a brief survey of that history, see my 1991 Cato Institute paper here.)

But at least Brooks sees the grave damage U.S. policy has done:

We've got to acknowledge first that the old debates are obsolete. I wish the U.S could still go off, after Iraq, at the head of" coalitions of the willing" to spread democracy around the world. But the brutal fact is that the events of the past year have discredited that approach.

Not that he has really learned the appropriate lesson, however:

We've got to reboot. We've got to come up with a global alliance of democracies to embody democratic ideals, harness U.S. military power and house a permanent nation-building apparatus, filled with people who actually possess expertise on how to do this job. [Emphasis added.]

Sometimes you’ve just got to acknowledge that some people are hopeless.