Michael Ledeen has an excellent dose of common sense in today’s Opinion Journal, in which he points out that destroying the Islamofascists will require wholesale revolution in the Middle East, and that’s something at which Americans excel, if we can keep the pinstriped nervous nellies in Foggy Bottom from mucking it up in the name of “stability,” as they did at the end of the Gulf War.

…Yes, I know that our diplomats hate “instability,” but most Americans not only are able to cope with it, they go out of their way to create it. Stability is for those older, burnt-out countries, not for the American dynamo. And chaos is vastly preferable to the vicious tyrannical stability that has crushed and impoverished the people of Afghanistan.

Exactly. Stability is vastly overrated. The Soviet Union was stable for decades. Iraq has been a stable haven for terrorism and dictatorship for the past decade, thank you very much, State Department.

We may need to shift a few borders here and there, and topple a few corrupt regimes, but as can be seen in Afghanistan in the past couple of days, we will do it with the aid of the people of the region, and in the end, they will be much better off. To the degree that it is very messy now, that will be the result of how badly we (the West, that is, particularly Britain) botched it the first time during decolonialisation. It’s time to go back and take a “do over,” and do it right this time.