I took it Mallaby's point was to announce his own "pessimism" without doing it in so many words.

Woolsey has no credibility whatsoever. He is known in intelligence circles as having been so in love with satellite surveillance that he oversaw the reduction in "humint", real spies and human sources.

I wrote him off, forever, when I saw him commenting sagely on CNN, only a couple of hours after the WTC collapse. He said, with commanding gravitas, when asked about likely cuplrits "Look to Iraq."

This country was founded by men who didn't believe the US should be interfering in other nations, period.

That said, of course within a few decades the US was doing exactly that. Because no state can be a state without being imperialist. It's impossible. No state can tolerate another state having equal authority.

Ayn Rand used to argue against the right anarchist concept of competing protection agencies by proclaiming that violence was inevitable when two such agencies tried to protect opposing interests.

Her problem was she was completely blind to the fact that that IS the position of every state - and must be so based on Austrian economic theory.

The state is an attempt to establish a monopoly on the use of force over a given geographicsl area or population set. The economic problem is that there IS no such thing as a "natural" monopoly - and if there is, it can be competed against by other such monopolies, rendering its monopoly status useless. The only way to establish a monopoly is through some form of coercion.

And this is what a state is - a necessarily coercive structure which cannot tolerate a competing coercive structure.

This doesn't even include the basic problem of human nature which is based on primate hierarchical behavior patterns that demand that the majority of the population set kowtow to an alpha males (while at the same time wrangling for position in the hierarchy amongst themselves.)

Nor does it include the pragmatic fact that some states simply have more wealth, power, population, and technology than others.

So we have "diplomacy" - which is where the weaker state tries to survive by either bowing to the stronger state or making alliances with other strong states in opposition to the threatening state.

Compared to this, the fictions called "democracy", "freedom", "free market" (there is no such thing in existence anywhere on the planet, to my knowledge, unfortunately) are meaningless except as pyschosocial tools for manipulating the primate mind.

To paraphrase Hermann Goering, whenever anyone begins talking about freedom and democracy (or social justice, or humanitarianism, or socialism, or humanism, or Marxism, or any number of other buzzwords - perhaps even anarchism in many cases), I release the safety catch of my pistol. .

Because he's trying to enslave me with ruminant evacuation.

And it won't be long before he's simply trying to enslave me with a gun.

Re: Um I was about to write annalytical. My apologies.
I HOPE youse guys understand that I am kidding around . Actually I think Jim Woolsley can tell some great jokes, and I meant my original post to function as a compliment to him. I've heard him on C-Span. He does have great analytical capacities. 

I understand many of the points that you are making. Well I guess I don't think that men are the only ones capable of control oriented behaviours, some of which produce some of the wierdest situations that I've come across. Often enough, these sort of updated displays of alphahood are more apt to be scripted/scored/parodied in a tabloid, film, or live comedy show. 
I guess a better tact is to press for continuous self-examination, with an eye toward truly coming to terms with our own urges and contributions to any situation.