The Best Trained, Most Professional Military...Just Lost Two Wars?

[TheCurmudgeon]

I would personally rather let the Army be an Army... if we really desperately need some organization to turn nations into democracies we should build a new organization, let the Army handle Army functions (fighting armed antagonists and training the host country military) and have a civilian organization tasked with the rest of it.

I agree completely.

Whether we really need to be going around trying to impose democracy in other countries is another question altogether, to which I suspect "no" is a really good answer.

I don't think it is that simple, although I agree that we cannot "impose democracy". The world is changing as those parts of the world who are not democratic experiment with the idea or fight against it altogether. It took the French nearly a hundred years from the revolution to a stable democracy and included two emperors and at least two republics. The original round of revolutions of 1848 would not see a stable Europe for over another hundred years and two world wars. I suspect that we will see the same types of gestation from the Arab Spring. Political transitions of this type are messy. They involve an internal restructuring of the society's value system. We may not be able to force countries into becoming a democracy but we certainly can limit the damage that they will inevitably do, that may end up on our doorstep, as they make the transition themselves.