Regime Change Begins at Home
Lots of articles on regime change and nation buildingthis week. Here's some of my favorites:
Regime Change
South Africa considers options in Zimbabwe Regime change in Zimbabwe would help to reintroduce political stability to Africa. Christopher Clapham and Greg Mills examine whether this is more likely to be achieved by multilateral diplomacy or pre-emptive military action. [Jane's Defense Weekly]

Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair Wolfowitz: Yeah. There was a long discussion during the day about what place if any Iraq should have in a counterterrorist strategy. On the surface of the debate it at least appeared to be about not whether but when. There seemed to be a kind of agreement that yes it should be, but the disagreement was whether it should be in the immediate response or whether you should concentrate simply on Afghanistan first.[Department of Defense]

Nation Building
Building Nations "In a way, Iraq has become a theme park of conservative policy nostrums. There are no burdensome government regulations. Health and safety inspectors and environmental busybodies are nowhere to be seen. The Ministry of Finance, Iraq’s equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, is a scorched ruin. Museums and other cultural institutions, having been largely emptied of their contents, no longer have much use for public subsidies. Gun control is being kept within reasonable limits. (Although the occupying authorities are trying to discourage possession of heavy munitions, AK-47s and other assault weapons—guns of the type whose manufacture Tom DeLay and most of the House Republicans plan to re-legalize back home—have been given a pass.) And, in the absence of welfare programs and other free-lunch giveaways, faith-based initiatives are flourishing. The faith in question may be Iranian-style militant Shiism, but at least it’s fundamentalist." [The New Yorker]

Superior Person, Curzon in India They don’t make empires the way they used to. Take the imperial brag. Here is George Nathaniel, Viscount Curzon—the most grandiloquent, if not the greatest, Viceroy of India—and the subject of David Gilmour’s elegant biography, “Curzon” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $45), waxing epic-messianic on the British imperial mission: “To me the message is carved in granite; it is hewn out of the rock of doom—that our work is righteous and that it shall endure.” And here is Proconsul Jay Garner, musing on the prospects of the American imperium in Iraq: “If we make headway on a lot of major things, we will put ourselves in a marvellous up-ramp where things can begin happening. If we don’t do that we’re on a negative ramp.” ...
Curzon: We must remember that the ways of Orientals are not our ways, nor their thoughts our thoughts. Often when we think them backward and stupid, they think us meddlesome and absurd. The loom of time moves slowly with them, and they care not for high pressure and the roaring of the wheels. Our system may be good for us; but it is neither equally, not altogether good for them. Satan found it better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven; and the normal Asiatic would sooner be misgoverned by Asiatics than well governed by Europeans. [The New Yorker]