Iraq is not a Conservative War
January 12, 2007 · By Aaron Unruh
Let’s get one thing straight. The invasion of Iraq was not carried out by conservatives. The assumptions underpinning the liberation of Iraq, particularly that Iraqis would take advantage of the fall of Saddam to embrace their own freedom and build democratic institutions, were profoundly liberal and optimistic. Instead, darker conservatives like Pat Buchanan turned out to be right. Sunnis and Shi’ites have embraced their freedom all right, but have used it to kill one another rather than building institutions to aggregate their opposing interests.
The “surge” might make a difference, it may not. The real lesson of Iraq is humbling: Despite an enormous academic literature on “democratization,” we still have little clue about the conditions requires for democracy to take root. And to the small number of cases used to substantiate those shaky academic claims has just been added an enormous contrasting case.
One thing is for sure. Liberal optimism, at least when it comes to the ability of non-western peoples to adopt democratic forms of government, is wildly misplaced.
Lol.
You’re trying to funny, right?
Got any evidence or you just pulling this out of your ass?
‘The “surge” might make a difference, it may not.’
Way to go out on a limb there. If it succeeds, is a surge a consservative idea? What about if it fails?
This is why the Conservatives in England strongly opposed this war. But the thing we have to realise is that regardless of what the point of this war was, it was the Conservatives around the world who supported it. We supported it primarily because Saddam Hussein was the Middle East’s own Hitler and because after 9/11 we could not have rogue leaders like Hussein funding terrorism whether it was to kill Israelis, Americans or his own people.
The whole liberation of Iraq was an added bonus as we figured the people would rise up. They did rise up, but with time the insurgency grew strong enough to complicate things. Furthermore, we did not secure the Iranian border or occupy cities effectively enough.
This war could’ve been won, but there was a lot of idiocy and naivety at play.
If we supported the attack on Iraq because we can’t have Rogue leaders like Hussein funding terrorism, then why would we support the US government who funded the initial genocide by Saddam. The same people who backed Israel on their brutal attacks this summer, again the same people want to wage war on Iran when Iran has repeatedly asked for negotiations withthe US.
Alright let’s get a few thinsg straight here.
1. The invasion of Afghanistan and of Iraq were driven by realist foreign policy assumptions (revenge in the case of Afghanistan, WMDs in the case of Iraq).
2. In order to justify continued operations, fundamentally liberal values are being presented to make the case (and indeed I agree with these liberal values and our need to spread them around the world).
3. The invasions were not driven out of a liberal mentality but were rather realist invasions with liberal window dressing. This fact absolutely infuriates me in part because it has led to some of the discrediting of liberal and liberal cosmopolitan thought on the issue of foreign policy (as a liberal cosmopolitan myself I am distressed at the potential damage this is having on perhaps the most moral set of foreign policy ethics).
This becomes problematic because, based on my research, nation-building has come as a secondary priority that was considered after the fact. Unlike the overly optimistic generals and politicians who say maybe we need to be in Afghanistan for 10 years, I would argue we need to be there at least 30 in one capacity or another so we can educate the current young generation and oversee the education of the next one as well as liberal education is vital for the long-term success of a liberal-democracy in a nation that has no culture of democracy.
I think the biggest challenge to the spreading of democracy and human rights around the world is the issue of economic development vs. political development. We know that democracy requries a strong middle-class for success; the evidence for this is quite clear. However, which should come first? Infrastructure and the economy or democracy? I would argue the economy first and democracy second; this would give us time to fight the illiteracy, particularly amongst women, that is rampant in many third world countries and allow us to cultivate the roots of liberalism through education. Our problem is that we have rushed too quickly to have elections and a new parliament in Afghanistan. It looks good but it is not substantive democracy and indeed is even problematic since many of the people we don’t want in power got elected. The problem of rushing the democractic part is that the people are more likely to elect highly undesireble governments that can slow down or even halt progress in liberalizing the country.
I don’t think liberal and liberal cosmopolitan approaches to foreign policy are misplaced. In fact, I believe the world is looking more for a more ethical approach to foreign policy and it lies not in the self-interested realist school, nor in the critical school that refuses to accept liberal democracy by accusing it of being a capitalist attempt to maintain the status quo and further oppress and exploit the third world, nor even in the more radical cosmopolitan views that advocate either global government or discounting the fact that while we can see everyone as equal we do feel a special bond to family, community, and state that is only natural (it is only contradictory to the cosmopolitan ideal if we think that this connection means these people are more equal than anyone else; the right intentions in this regard are important). The way of the future is for the west to accept its moral obligation and duty to spread liberal democracy around the world. The invasions of Aghanistan and Iraq were not done for that but they are the perfect places to begin and indeed since we invaded and accepted responsibility for their people we have no choice but to stay. An abandonment would be an ever greater moral travesty.
I hope you guys never reproduce.
Holy crap.
That’s the new talking point, huh?
This takes the cake, it really does.
My goodness, praise Allah that you guys are a fringe minority.
The Iraq was is not a conservative war? HA!
Are you delusional, or are you trying to consciously distance yourself from something that is unpopular.
Let’s check out your archives. Will be back in a bit.
http://www.thepolitic.com/arch.....h-on-iraq/
http://www.thepolitic.com/arch.....very-well/
http://www.thepolitic.com/arch.....ervatives/
Some of these titles give them away. For some of them, it’s the content. Eitherway, The Politic’s archives are stock-full of opinions, which prove that Aaron Unruh is hypocritical, and only trying to distance himself from this mess called the Iraq War.
Congratulations Aaron, admitting you have a problem is the first step.
Throbbin: Thanks for taking two whole posts to demonstrate absolutely nothing.
Scott: We’re a “fringe minority” that currently makes up the government of Canada. Perhaps it’s time to update those 1997 Liberal talking points?
http://www.bestposters.ru/db/BFP1178.jpg
In the event you wanted an illustration for the post. Starry-eyed foreign policy hawks in the Republican Party are every iota as ‘conservative’ - in the sense of ‘right wing’ - as they are ‘liberal,’ presumably in the sense of ‘earnest about liberal democracy.’
And unless you’re talking about economics, I really don’t think Rumsfeld, Bremmer or Cheney can be foisted off on liberaldom even to the exceedingly limited extent that, say, Feith and Wolfowitz might be. And even they are the sort of GOP-think-tank-dwellers that scare the hell out of your garden-variety large-and-small L liberals on both sides of the border.
The pro-war right owns Iraq, in terms of the bleak political millstone for years to come; you broke it, you bought it.
Iraq is not a conservative war any more than Harper is a conservative. Neither is it a ‘liberal’ war. It was a war heavily sponsored by, promoted by, and consistent with the principles of ‘neo-conservatives’, a somewhat misleading term given to the radical authoritarian right.
If one substitutes a right-left spectrum for the specific and disputed terminology of ‘conservative,’ ‘liberal’, ‘neoconservative’ and so forth, the case is more clear cut; it’s the right’s war, and good luck to the right in arguing otherwise.
‘Neoconservative’ is as mutilated a term as they come; its most common application is nowadays seems to be in referring to the entire ‘new right’ movement since Goldwater, which is almost as farcically inappropriate as the American usage of ‘liberal’ to mean ‘anything related to the left.’ But etymologically, the term refers more specifically to the people Adam’s post blamed the war on, individuals who are sometimes only moderately ‘right wing,’ but extremely dedicated to a certain world-view antithetical to American and Canadian ‘L/liberals.’
I don’t even use the word anymore; it’s both a loaded political epithet and apt to be misunderstood. On the other hand, that sure as hell doesn’t mean I’m going to start calling PNAC types ‘liberal.’
If you wish to indulge in oversimplistic generalization, it’s “the Right’s” war.
However, there is a huge rift on the right between - to use the names by which they broadly refer to each other and themselves - the “neocons” and the “paleocons”. More descriptively, there is a rift between those who believe the US is or should be an imperial power, and those who prefer the US remain true to its roots as a republic (”friends of liberty everywhere, guardians of only our own” etc).
There is absolutely no controversy over the fact that the neoconservative movement originated with disaffected Democrats, but I agree the label has almost lost any useful meaning. Perhaps a better name is one I have seen thrown around in the US - neo-Jacobins.
I doubt new pejoratives are better than old ones; and as for the paleo-con neo-con construction, I think there are a lot of conservatives uneasy with either of those groupings. As I recall, paleoconservative used to refer to conservatives in the broadly Pat Buchanan mold, specifically, rather than simply all conservatives who were not neoconservatives.
To my mind, both of those narrowly defined groups are small minorities within, say, the Republican Party. The “New Right-” Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Dole, Cheney, Rumsfeld - and the rump which remains of the old moderate “Rockafeller Republican” wings both probably outnumber Neo- and Paleo-cons.
In writing a taxonomy of conservatism in 2006, the groups that lept out at me were neoconservatives - small in number, but formerly influential - the new right, the most dynamic and influential grouping in recent decades, social conservatives and evangelicals as an overlapping wing, and then various detritus of the past, like paleoconservatives, Rockafeller Republicans and Red Tories, neither numerous nor influential.
Obviously, YMMV, but I think ‘paleo-con’ may just be expanding its meaning in the same way that ‘neo-con’ did during the Bush Administration - with similarly confusing results.
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