Author Rory Stewart is a star at Harvard’s Kennedy School, mentioned as a future Foreign Secretary in the UK. Here he is in the Kashmir Observer, putting the lie to the George Packer-Charles Ferguson claim that the Iraq invasion, which Stewart supported, would have succeeded if we just hadn’t disbanded the army.

My instinct is that the mission was doomed from the start. Of course we made a number of errors – de-Baathification, abolition of the army, looting, etc., etc. – but these were ultimately minor. Even had we avoided those errors, the invasion would still have failed. The reasons lay deep in the limitations of contemporary Western government institutions, which in turn reflect the limitations of our own politics and society on the one side and on the other the fractures within Iraqi society.

Then he goes after the neocons:

Some of the critics of these kinds of interventions say the problem is we’re not being Machiavellian enough or aggressive enough. But the reality is that our societies don’t produce Machiavellian princes, but even if they did produce Machiavellian princes the public and those officials would not be comfortable with such treatment. And even if they were it is unlikely it would be successful for the final reason, which is of course the destruction of Iraqi society itself, which has been significantly hollowed out: the political administration has for the last twenty or thirty years lacked any autonomy, financial responsibility, or independence; people are very reluctant to take political office or exercise political power; most of the traditional forces such as the Sheikh were largely obliterated over fifty years of land reform and change; and Iraqi society essentially is struggling to reconcile itself to the reality of a foreign occupation. Nationalism is extremely strong, insurgency and sectarianism is extremely strong. In different ways all of these things meant that the Iraqi society is extremely unlikely either to consent to the occupation or to provide people who are prepared to take on the sort of administration involved in this sort of occupation.

KO: So in light of the troubles in Iraq and the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, are the tools of Western foreign policy and reconstruction incapable of building and securing democracies in foreign countries?

RS: I think the creation of democratic institutions is something that needs to be led from people within a country. It’s not something that can be imposed from outside. There are minor roles that these institutions can play – providing information, providing basic security – but it’s extremely unlikely they would be capable of building the required institutions of government….

For instance in the United States some talk a very aggressive and hawkish line, and there’s an entire neo-conservative counterculture with its own extremist rhetoric…