WHY ISN'T THEIR LIBERTY WORTH OUR DEBT?:

'Conservative' World Order? (E. J. Dionne Jr., September 17, 2004, Washington Post)

It may sound contrived, but my affection for conservatives and conservatism has a lot to do with why I'm so frustrated over the political choices these friends of mine are making.

I agree with them that the spread of democracy is good for both the United States and the world. I believe there are appropriate uses for U.S. military power. While our country has not always used its power wisely, our role in defeating the Nazis and Soviet communists vindicates the idea that the United States has been a force for good.

But I fear that my neocon buddies have embarked on a project in Iraq that risks sabotaging the very ideas and policies they cherish, in part because they did not consider those unintended consequences they so often advise us liberals to think about.

As a practical matter, I think my friends should be furious at the Bush administration over the way it has handled Iraq. The idea that our country had the capacity to transform Iraq into a thriving democracy was always a reach. But if we were going to make this enormous effort, the conservative thing to do was to assume from the beginning that it would be hard.

That's why it's astounding -- and un-conservative -- that we went in with the arrogant assumption that we are so good and our ideals were so right that even if we tried to do this with too small a force, everything would turn out fine. How could conservatives ignore the military professionals who rightly insisted that we needed many more troops to pull off such an ambitious endeavor? Isn't prudence, as the first President Bush used to remind us, a conservative virtue?

If my conservative friends were going to go out there to transform the world -- a big and seemingly liberal objective -- they needed to be honest and prepare the American people for a long and difficult struggle. They should have insisted that the effort be paid for and not depend on enormous budget deficits thrown onto those future generations that they so often invoke. The conservative thing to do was to prepare for the worst, not to assume the best.

Contrived? Why? Just because he claims to support the end but opposes the means? If FDR had been forced to pay for the war against fascism or Truman for the Cold War we'd have fought neither. That might have been a good thing, but does suggest that he's adopted an ahistorical standard for the precise purpose of avoiding democratization altogether.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 18, 2004 4:07 PM