Time to hand over the keys

Whatever the election outcome in 2 weeks, the endgame of neoconservatism as an intellectual doctrine is well underway. Today's Wall Street Journal editorial page is a case in point. First, an editorial (subs. req'd) whose title says it all --

Pakistan's Sovereignty

In case you haven't guessed, they're against it:

We don't know what General Musharraf promised President Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai during their recent conclave in the White House. But we hope it was more tangible cooperation than we have been seeing of late. Sovereignty has responsibilities, and General Musharraf is not exercising them.

The implied sanction is not spelt out. One benefit of the editorial is that it makes Max Boot (subs. req'd), across the page, seem more reasonable in his argument that the Darfur peacekeeping be outsourced to mercenaries --

In 1995-96, Executive Outcomes, a South African firm working for the government of Sierra Leone, made short work of a savage rebel movement known as the Revolutionary United Front that was notorious for chopping off the limbs of its victims. As a result, Sierra Leone was able to hold its first free election in decades. The now-defunct Executive Outcomes also helped the Angolan government quell a long-running insurgency by Jonas Savimbi's Unita, leading to the signing of a peace accord in 1994. Another private firm, MPRI, helped to bring peace to the former Yugoslavia in 1995 by organizing the Croatian military offensive that stopped Serbian aggression.

Hired guns could be equally effective in stopping the campaign of rape, murder and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Sudanese government and the janjaweed militia in Darfur. In fact, several firms have already offered their services. They could be employed by an international organization like the U.N. or NATO, by an ad hoc group of concerned nations, or even by philanthropists like Bill Gates or George Soros.

Only mentioned in passing is that peace wasn't restored to Sierra Leone until a regular contingent of British troops did the job, and the political scandals that have marked previous mercenary ventures (it's not clear that Boot ever Googled Sandline, for example). And left unsaid is who would pay them, what flag they would fight under (which matters for pesky little details like the Geneva conventions, for example), and how any truce would be maintained.

Behind Boot's proposal is a contradiction that goes to the heart of the neocon conundrum: remaking the world requires troops on the ground, but the American public won't stand for that level of mobilisation. As Niall Ferguson put it in Sunday's Telegraph --

Writing in the 1920s, the German historian Eckart Kehr argued that the foreign policy of the Kaiser's Germany was the defective product of the "primacy of domestic politics". Decisions about diplomacy and strategy, he argued, were determined not by rational international calculation but by short-sighted political machination: whether a bigger navy would satisfy the heavy industrial lobby, whether a higher tariff would square the Prussian landowners.

I have come to see that American foreign policy suffers from a similar pathology. The primacy of domestic politics, in the form of bureaucratic in-fighting and electoral manipulation, explains why the Iraq enterprise has, from the outset, been so chronically undermanned.

Not a particularly encouraging analogy.