"You are too shallow, Hastings...to sound the bottom of the after-times"*

There is a certain strain of conservative British fantasist that pits the folly of the common people, Coriolanus-like, against the beleaguered wisdom of leaders. George MacDonald, in The Princess and Curdie,  portrays a benevolent king gradually worn down by the recalcitrant foolishness and greed of his people.  In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, battle-hardened chieftains keep the faith and hold the line against the encroachments of Mordor as their people weaken.  C.S. Lewis has more of a feel for the ways in which the powerful and ruthless deceive and enslave common folk, but he too betrays a weakness, in the Dawn Treader vignette of the Dufflepods ruled by a fallen star, for the vision of the wise ruler bemusedly enduring the follies of his simple subjects  (though Lewis is more consistently smitten by the fantasy of a contented and submissive populace willingly ruled by wise and benevolent monarchs).

Perhaps it is in this spirit that Sir Max Hastings laments that voters in the western democracies will punish at the polls leaders who tell them the hard truth about "the scale of upheaval and the sacrifice necessary to meet it."  Suggesting that "we get the political leaders we deserve" -- which may in some ultimate sense be true -- Hastings seems blithely unaware of the first axiom of political science: economic conditions (absent all-encompassing catastrophe) shape the dominant public perceptions of leaders everywhere. There's not much point in excoriating "pampered European and American voters" for blaming "bad news" on leaders currently in power. All electorates everywhere do that, to the extent that they're free to choose at all. 

No risk-free course in Libya

Max Hastings writes a powerful brief in today's FT against yet another military plunge into the unknown in Libya:

The first principle for any nation using force is to ensure it succeeds. But in Iraq and Afghanistan the west has learnt that unseating regimes is relatively easy; the hard part is to promote acceptable alternatives.

The intelligence failure in Libya, and indeed across the Maghreb, has proved absolute. Western leaders know almost nothing either about the Libyan insurgents or about what is happening on the ground. It would be madness to commit US and allied forces to destroy Col Gaddafi, with no notion of what would follow.

What Hastings doesn't acknowledge, though, are the perhaps equally fraught consequences of standing aside. He overstates the upside of eschewing military intervention: