The Regime Change Fantasists

Those who flatter themselves that they are statesmen, looking at a regime they hate and want to overthrow, always imagine that it is just so much rotting wood which a swift kick would bring down, with the population subsequently welcoming them as liberators, making it easy and cheap for them to do as they please. They never imagine that the regime they so dislike may nonetheless command its people's loyalty, rallying them round the flag in a time of national crisis (even as they count on exactly that in their own country); that given a choice between an indigenous government, even one they would like very much to change, and the foreigners dropping bombs on them or marching into their streets with ideas of their own about how they will live, they will commonly choose the former rather than the latter (even as, again, they count on exactly that same inclination in their own country).

This is called "extreme stupidity." History is littered with its disastrous results. And its prevalence (such that the neoconservatives whose stock in trade this is are back) is a reminder, if any were needed, that politics is not a meritocracy, that those in charge are never the "best and brightest" as their fawning courtiers tell them and the world, but careerist mediocrities who picked their parents well, and played the filthy game of getting ahead slightly better (or at least, with a little more luck on their side) than the other careerist mediocrities who made up the competition.