The Bush doctrine of promoting democracy is a war strategy. It is neither conservative nor French. We were struck by the festering dysfunction of the Middle East that grew a collective brain known as terrorism. The dysfunction is the brain's oxygen. Bush is cutting of the oxygen.

The Bush doctrine of promoting democracy internationally, by force, is dreamy and slightly dangerous.

It's not at all conservative.

It's rather quite left-wing, except the liberals don't like it because it's based in religious proselytizing utopianism.

"Pragmatic" doesn't spring to mind when setting out to change the cultures and societies of a couple hundred million people.

Nothing is less realistic than to despair of the power of good in the world, or the power of love to triumph.

We have to juxtapose good against evil and put people to the choice. Some will choose good and some evil; then we will know who to kill and who to cooperate with. It is a war strategy as Jim says, and it is the only realistic war strategy.

Burke favoured cold realism over utopian dreaming. He took political philosophy to a new level of hard-headed practical realism. His thinking resonates through Conservative history.

This is a misunderstanding, albeit common, of Burke. Burke accepted that, from time to time, government became so corrupt that a revolutionary movement was needed. Burke was kindly disposed towards the American revolution and wrote Reflections to demolish the specious parallels drawn between the French Revolution (bad) and the Glorious Revolution (good). Burke's point was that a successful revolution was a rare state of affairs. A revolution would accomplish nothing if it were not the last desperate measure and based upon returning government to a time-tested foundation.

He didn't argue that the French shouldn't have revolted, but that the regime being put in place was worse than the ancien regime. (He might also have been arguing that the right of revolution was restricted to the natural aristocracy as a brake upon the power of the monarch, but that need not distract us now.) As a result, the new French government was squandering the earned power of government to act tyranically when necessary, which would lead in turn to the next revolution.

The easiest application of Burke to the Bush Doctrine is dissapproval. Burke took pains to explain why Britain should not support the French revolution and though he took pains to show that the French revolutionaries were not seeking ancient British rights, he also believed that the shape of French society was for the French alone. But what if he could have seen the future. Burke comes close to predicting that the revolution would lead to Napolean, and we now understand how likely it is that an institutionalized revolution will be expansionist. Might Burke then have thought Britain well advised to go into France to shape the revolutionary government? On purely pragmatic grounds -- yes.

pj:

Although I agree almost completely with your entire post, your first sentence is a liberal bumper sticker, and reinforces the fact that Bush's foreign policy isn't conservative.
It's unilateral, and effective, and uses total war, which make it unusual for left-wing foreign policy, but nonetheless...

The part that I disagree with is that Bush's plan isn't the only war strategy, nor is it the most realistic. What it is, is the most ambitious.

That was excellent, David. It is funny how we tend to associate the greats of the past with one idea and one fixed image of that ideal. Burke has become the poster boy for anti-war conservatives, who (like Peter Hitchens)love to haul out all the same quotes and conjure up images of timeless rural arcadias and isolation from the rest of the world. I think Burke would have been a big fan of the President.

Something similar has happened to Adam Smith, who actually had some very critical things to say about the entrepreneurial character and how awful it would be if everyone shared it.