Who Knew Promoting Democracy Would be a Disaster for Millions of People?

I certainly didn't.  I thought getting rid of tyrants was a good idea.

But in the process, because we and other countries insisted on maintaining colonial borders, we created an abyss which gangs, covering up their real intentions by claiming to be jihadists, took over thousands of square miles and created chaos.

Now, just to be clear, this policy of promoting Democracy is an old one practiced by Presidents of both parties.  The Marshall Plan had this as a basis. So did the Vietnam War, our invasion of Panama, our support of Israel, many things the Clinton administration tried to do, the War in Iraq, and of course our support for the Arab Spring.

What we all overlooked, even if we knew it was a problem in the back of our brains, is what Thomas Friedman wrote today, and while I feel the non-Tea Party GOP gets this better than liberal Democrats do, the GOP slavishness toward raising revenues to pay for wars prevents them from having a convincing policy that their way is better than the Democrat's way.

"That is because the three largest forces on the planet — Mother Nature (climate change, biodiversity loss and population growth in developing countries), Moore’s law (the steady doubling in the power of microchips and, more broadly, of technology) and the market (globalization tying the world ever more tightly together) — are all in simultaneous, rapid acceleration."

"This combination is stressing strong countries and blowing up weak ones. And the ones disintegrating first are those that are the most artificial: their borders are mostly straight lines that correspond to no ethnic, tribal or religious realities and their leaders, rather than creating citizens with equal rights, wasted the last 60 years by plundering their national resources. So when their iron fists come off (in Libya and Iraq with our help), there is nothing to hold these unnatural polygons together."

....

"Historically we’ve counted on empires, like the Ottomans, colonial powers, like Britain and France, and autocratic strongmen, such as kings and colonels, to hold artificial states together and provide order in these regions. But we’re now in a post-imperial, post-colonial and, soon, I believe, post-authoritarian world, in which no one will be able to control these disorderly regions with an iron fist while the world of order goes about its business as best it can with occasional reminders of the nasty disarray on its frontiers."

.....

"If we’re honest, we have only two ways to halt this refugee flood, and we don’t want to choose either: build a wall and isolate these regions of disorder, or occupy them with boots on the ground, crush the bad guys and build a new order based on real citizenship, a vast project that would take two generations. We fool ourselves that there is a sustainable, easy third way: just keep taking more refugees or create “no-fly zones” here or there."

"Will the ends, will the means. And right now no one wants to will the means, because all you win is a bill. So the world of disorder keeps spilling over into the world of order. And beware: The market, Mother Nature and Moore’s law are just revving their engines. You haven’t seen this play before, which is why we have some hard new thinking and hard choices ahead."