“I No Longer Believe …”

Daniel Larison has written a superb addendum to Rod Dreher’s list of things he once believed that he no longer does. This leapt out at me in particular:

2)  One of my other false beliefs connected to this was that most conservatives were conservatives first and GOP partisans second (if at all), and would therefore be just as outraged by GOP government activism and overreach as they had been in the 1990s.  This was the worst sort of naivete on my part, and it was repeatedly shown to be false.  To point out that some of the same people who wanted to attack Iraq opposed aggression against Yugoslavia was almost useless  – partisans are well aware that they use a double standard, and they have no problem with it. Again, I mistook the attitudes of conservatives whom I knew for what was true for “conservatives” generally – this was just sloppy analysis. 3) Another false belief that I held was that most conservatives were conservative as a result of custom and reflection, with rather more emphasis on the latter, and to discover that most conservatives were such on the basis of little more than visceral dislike of various hate figures was something that took some time to accept.

I am guilty of the same misjudgment, although my mistake was worse than Larison’s, since I backed the Iraq war passionately, and he didn’t. A provisional list of my own:

1. I believed that the United States would never violate the Geneva Conventions and that an American president would never authorize torture as a policy. Semantics aside, I have been forced to accept that this has indeed happened, and that the American public, by and large, is fine with it. 2. I believed that there was no doubt that Saddam had stockpiles of WMDs, and that these constituted an active and potential threat to the US, Europe and Israel.

3. I believed that rough-and-ready democracy could be brought to the Arab Middle East within a few years. I now believe democracy as the West understands it will not take root in the Arab world in my lifetime, if ever.

4. I didn’t think a US occupying force would simply shrug its shoulders at spiraling chaos in a country it had invaded and occupied.

5. I didn’t think the American public would re-elect a commander-in-chief of such an occupying force.

6. I thought that conservative intellectuals would show a modicum of intellectual honesty in grappling with the disaster in Iraq. Most didn’t and haven’t.

7. I didn’t think we would go another six years after 9/11 without a major terror attack on US soil.

The Case For Callousness

Derb makes the conservative point:

[T]he argument that moral responsibility for whatever happens rests on us is not clear to me.  Where were our intentions not honorable?  At which point during the last four and a half years were we trying to incite Iraqis to kill Iraqis?  At which point were we doing anything other than try to help them—however clumsily and sometimes wrong-headedly—to get their act together as a nation?  How long do we have to struggle with such efforts before our moral responsibility can fairly be considered to have been discharged?

You seem to be making an argument of unlimited moral responsibility.  I doubt there is a market for that.  Most voters, in their everyday lives, feel that if they make a blunder that causes someone distress, there is some finite and proportionate action they can take as recompense.  That is the common understanding of moral responsibility.  It seems, in any case, to have been the one that American voters applied to the horrors of post-1975 SE Asia.  My guess is that they will apply it to post-2008 Iraq likewise.

My only caveat is the notion that our motives have been entirely honorable. I certainly believe that many honorable people took an honorable stance in favor of war. I hope that crowd includes me. But I’m less and less sure that the actual architects of this war were honorable: that they were candid about our goals, that they were humane in their conduct of war, and that what they said they were aiming for was what they actually were aiming for. That mistrust has grown with the gradual exposure of their deceptions. But I don’t think that this itself necessitates an open-ended occupation of Iraq, as this president clearly intends. An attempt to bring minimal peace and order to those regions we can, while redeploying to allow some kind of de facto partition seems to me to be a morally defensible response to the damage we have helped cause.

By the way, is anyone struck by the fact that the major candidate offering as bleak and brutal a vision of  Iraq as John Derbyshire is not a Republican but Barack Obama?

A Nervous Republican

Hillarystephenmortongetty

A reader writes:

As a fellow Republican I have to agree with your reader’s comments about Hillary in these debates; she’s been hard to hate lately. Just like her husband Bill, she’s a very calculating and conniving politician. But maybe that’s why she’s starting to appeal to some. Her supposed weaknesses are becoming her strengths. After eight years of Bush’s off-the-cuff, gut feeling, permanent democratic revolution maybe a politician like Hillary is exactly what the country needs.

Although Hillary might dream of trying to institute some radical New Deal-like socialist society, she’s way too smart to attempt something so drastic. Like Slick Willie, I’m pretty certain she won’t lift a finger without thinking long and hard about the long-term consequences, the reaction of the American public, global opinion, and most importantly, her standings in the polls.

It’s when she gets screeching and hollering on the campaign trail that horrifies the right and average Joes. When she tries appeals to her base, say speaking before a Planned Parenthood conference or in an African-American church that she becomes unbearable.

But when she’s speaking to a national audience, as she was last night, she’s turns out to be not so scary. And this is coming from a Weekly Standard/National Review subscriber. What would Kristol think??

Quick, Andrew, more Ron Paul or at least some Fred Thompson posting! I’m making myself nervous.

(Photo: Stephen Morton/Getty.)