E.D. - you are worrying about the wrong thing. Again.

“from a humanitarian and democracy promotion standpoint, intervention has produced far more failures than successes.”

Sure. And Waffen SS won the Battle of Midway too.

Roland,

Check IISS's Military Balance 2009 here:

http://www.iiss.org/

It's going to happen sooner or later and 44's current neocons in humanitarian clothing like Dr Samantha Power and UN ambassador Dr Susan Rice actually look forward to trashing certain regimes.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/july-dec06/darfur_11-17.html

Also check Dr Rice's bit about using R2P to kill state or militia sanctioned killers anytime anywhere.

http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/1024darfur_rice_Opp08.aspx

Unlikely? Unrealistic?

Au contraire'

E.D.,

Generational commitments of the last millennium had military commitments that totally dwarf anything in the ME - including the 1st Gulf War.

Like NATO.

Recent SOFA agreements totally fulfill Dr Rice's pronouncement

"Leave them be."
Dangerously wishful and illogical.

Despots and tyrants are the cause of instability - and historically that instability is never confined to their own borders. Add WMD in the mix - it could be said the Free World is just asking for it.

" Set up trade. Keep the world as open as possible. Live by example. Encourage liberalism where we find it. Publicly discourage tyrannical behavior. Keep trading. Help create a world where the flow of goods can be realized."

Realpolitik, nicht war? The faux school played ideas like stability, deterrence, and containment are suspect since 911.

A case could be made that Realpolitik's ammoral corrupt cult of stability, a history of genocide, terrorism and wars, that sucked up to any despot horrid or benign actually created the age of Regime Change.

Closed societies - Like Syria, that fear Facebook, abuse Palestinians as strategic resources and literally bomb a sovereign semi democratic member of the UN's political cadre out of existence do NOT merit trade, friendly dialogue or lectures. They need to be regime changed and put out of biz.

"Looking to our own interests first and foremost" is perfectly correct

Freddie,

"vanishingly small number of countries and that have absolutely no chance of being met by the current “bad actors” in the world"

Yes! Annihilating creepy time traveling intolerants or semi secular leaders for life that retard - in the classic sense no less - the timely development of values like fun and free choice or as Uncle Tony put it, "the Universal Values of the Human Spirit" is well within any of the League of Hot! Democrazies and their fully crunk 30 year in the future militaries.

Again, in the age of WMD - why even tolerate them? Many illegit, unelected, nigh unhinged regimes can be taken out - all the way out over a long week end.

"not invading other countries under self-defeating “democracy by force” adventures that leave the world less stable, the people less free and more dead, and our own country less capable of providing for its own defense?"

Totally incorrect on all three counts - and sooo 2003, btw.

"In other words, the very premise for invading countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan in order to democratize them and thereby impose peace through war, is a false premise."

That is suspect.

Every threat to internat'l order after the Cold War involved a government that fell short of Western and economic standards. Every security problem that the American government felt called upon to address would be alleviated, if not solved altogether, if the regimes responsible for them could be remade to American specs: Tolerant, egalitarian societies with a penchant for periodic, transparent elections, a free, uncensored press, a nat'l treasury under public scrutiny, a military under civie control, an independent judiciary under elected Gov oversight

Many critics of neoconservatism amazingly (or perhaps on purpose) fail to include Dr Rice's caveat that such a correct manuever in the new millennium ...

"Is a generational commitment. But it is not a generational commitment in military terms; it is a commitment of our support to them, our political support and an understanding that democracy takes time.”

Smokescreen aside - what is the alternative?

In an age of WMD crunk caliphates that tend to torment their own people, their neighbors and fiddle about with WMD?

Hope for the best?
Isolationism?
Realpolitik era treaties with known oathbreakers?