August 03, 2006

Blogometer PM Extra II

IRAQ: MessoRedStatia

The "realist" v. "neo-con" fissure evidenced by last week's George Will/William Kristol dust-up is now showing up at RedState. Paul Cella writes:

Among the Editors here, I stand as perhaps the most skeptical of the American adventure in Iraq. I wrote that “I support a war of self-defense, but I am very skeptical about the idea of preemptive war” — and I stand firmly by this. The issue of preemptive war, which focused the controversy back in 2003, has since receded from view because the supposition of Iraq’s possession of nuclear weapons proved false; but I remain profoundly wary of it.

I see that I have ranged too far afield. My point is that the political theory behind the war in Iraq is, to my eye, a sloppy admixture of Christian sentimentality and a theory of politics subversive of Christian and Conservative teaching. How Conservatives — even if they thought Saddam was an imminent threat — can in good conscience sign on to this, is hard to understand; unless we stipulate that either (1) they do not know their political theory or (2) they do not know their history.

Later Crank responds: "Is the Iraq War a conservative project? Certainly those supporting it have generally been conservatives, but some on the Right - see this column by George Will and this essay by our own Paul Cella - have argued that the war, and most specifically the use of U.S. military power to support democratization in Iraq, is not true to conservative principles. Now, part of the explanation for this disagreement is that there are different strains of thought within the larger conservative movement; I intend to come back to examine those differences another day, but for now, that's beyond the scope of this essay. Even in the context of the areas in which conservatives can agree, I dissent from the characterization of the war effort as somehow un-conservative."

Finally Leon Wolf comments:

I swore to myself that I would not get publicly involved in the long-running debate amongst conservatives which recently made its way onto the front pages of RedState about whether the current War in Iraq is a "conservative" venture, a "liberal" one, or some species of "other. ... So what do I expect will come out of Iraq, in the final analysis? I don't have a crystal ball to predict this, but I'm less confident that "democracy" (as it is commonly employed in a metonymous fashion for "classical liberalism") is the answer to the problem of Islamofascism. I am even less convinced that the exportation of democracy as a magic pill to cure a society's ills is "conservative," although that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the wrong thing to do.

Mostly, I think that the current experiment is philosophically neutral, in that its actual justification is a non-military means of national self-defense; and I can't pigeonhole that - but what I can say is that I'm increasingly uncomfortable that the success of philosophical conservatism, as it will be determined in the partisan political arena - will be judged for this generation by a "neutral" adventure in a foreign country. Our wagon should not be hitched to this horse, however strong it might be.

Posted by Conn Carroll at August 3, 2006 03:13 PM