William Pfaff's new book
The Irony of Manifest Destiny is well worth reading, if not comforting (see book list in sidebar for details). A couple of relevant quotations:
The common Western assumption about history is that it moves toward an intelligible conclusion,a belief derived from Western religious eschatology...... In the case of the theory, common to liberals as well as many conservatives, of universal progress toward democracy, the presumption made is that the seeming self-evident superiority of democracy makes it the natural end point of history. A foreign policy of military intervention to speed progress toward this inevitable outcome logically follows. Liberalism in the American sense nearly always sees the increasing complexity and interdependence of modern society, and the advance of technology, science and human knowledge, as evidence of positive change in the moral (and political) nature of humans -- an assumption for which there is no evidence.
and
The proposition that the United States can or should devote the next fifteen,or fifty, years to"making" modem nations of Afghanistan or Pakistan, by means of a massive introduction into these countries of American officials, advisers,and teachers, as well as soldiers to suppress military uprisings or resistance to such an effort, at first proposed by the G.W. Bush administration, seems to me not ignoble, but simply breathtakingly ignorant, impractical, indifferent to historical experience and the political limits on nations, and contrary to the will as well as the interests of the peoples involved.
As you can see, he doesn't pull his punches. Yet I find his arguments well researched and thoroughly persuasive.
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