In case it's hard for you to understand why our foreign-policy apparatus is so just plain awful at dealing with large transitions - like the one we're seeing in the Middle East right now, here's John Gaddis, talking about the Cold War in his book of the same title The Cold War: A New History.

A kind of moral anesthesia settled in, leaving the stability of the Soviet-American relationship to be valued over its fairness because the alternative was too frightening to contemplate. Once it became clear that everybody was in the same lifeboat, hardly anyone wanted to rock it.

The moral ambivalence was not moral equivalence. the United States never found it necessary to violate human rights on the scale that the Soviet Union, its Eastern European allies, and the Chinese under Mao Zedong had done. But Washington officials had long since convinced themselves that the only way they could prevent those violations was to go to war, a prospect that could only make things much worse.

"If you want to change that, the only answer is war" is something I've heard - approvingly from some on the right and disapprovingly from some on the left - in talking about the stuckness of the situation of the people in the Middle East. Everyone is afraid, and not unreasonably - lots and lots can go very very wrong.

Why we're not planning to see what we can do to help it go right is the $64,000 question, and the flatfootedness with which we're acting (and have acted under lots of prior Administrations) is definitely facepalm territory.
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