America's covert colonialist consensus should come out into the open. Then we can stop being surprised when we end up running countries, from Bosnia to Iraq, and concentrate on developing the difficult skills appropriate to the task. As we are learning in Iraq, breaking things is relatively easy, making them anew is very hard.

We can also openly study the British example and learn its lessons, especially how to create a -- in Ferguson's phrase -- "self-liquidating" empire, one that builds the institutions necessary to decent government, then leaves.

Among the most important of those lessons is that colonialism usually isn't appreciated by its beneficiaries. One of colonialism's fruits, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, is "The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard." The countervailing force necessary to seeing the enterprise through is moral self-confidence, which the British had in buckets.

Winston Churchill once asked, "What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations? To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning?"

It is a sign of the depth of America's covert colonialist consensus that part of even Howard Dean -- eager to intervene in Liberia -- agrees.