A REPUBLIC, NOT AN EMPIRE. "Manifest destiny warmed up?," teases The Economist. Concluding lines: "America will have to promote its aims some other way, probably by leading multilateral action. Empire is simply not the American way. If the United States has to intervene in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and then stay on, it will not enjoy the experience. Running the place, it will discover, is nasty and brutish, so it had better also be short. Good or bad, that is not what most people mean by an imperium." The Economist's editorial board offer some additional advice: "Even an unwanted empire is an empire, and hard to run on the cheap. Iraqistan requires the urgent application of more money, attention and ingenuity than America has invested so far. This need not mean staying for “the long haul”, as people say. It is possible that by doing more now, America may be able to pull out sooner. The key is to make enough of an effort now to ensure that these places will remain stable when the empire goes home.

The needs of the two places are not identical. The priorities for Iraq are to raise an effective local police force and put together a clear plan and timetable for a constitutional assembly and the election of a government that Iraqis will see as their own. Afghanistan needs more peacekeepers. In Bosnia in 1995, as soon as peace was agreed, America, Britain and France inserted 60,000 peacekeepers. By contrast, the whole of Afghanistan, a country 12 times the area with seven times the population, has only 5,000 or so troops providing security, plus another 12,000 or so mopping up the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. What folly. Failed states that are allowed to fail again will just have to be rescued again, if they are not to become a renewed threat to the security of the West." (Recommended by the useful Milt's File, run by the host of WGN's Extension 720, endorsed by Rick Majerus as the best talk radio show in the States. The radio show currently has a hawkish edge that was not present in the days Majerus was traveling and working on the book.)