The false postulates

A number of bloggers have commented on the National Review article by the Dean of all conservative thinkers, William F. Buckley. In it he says we have essentially lost the Iraq war, which has been the newsworthy item that all have pointed to. Few have commented directly on the following paragraphs from that article:

A problem for American policymakers - for President Bush, ultimately - is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.

One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.

The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.

This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail - in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.

I think these comments perfectly summarize what's wrong with the intellectual wing of the conservative movement in this country. Buckley refers to two underlying "postulates" about the war in Iraq which he later equates with American ideals. Here are the two "postulates:"

1) that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.

and

2) the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.

It is certainly true that these, or something very like them, were the driving force behind the neo-conservative thinking that led up to the war. That, indeed, is the problem with the neo-conservatives. They start from some sort of "first principles" that have no empirical support in reality, and then build a foreign policy based on them. Even now that Buckley admits the first principles were wrong in Iraq, he won't let go of them. As with the Bush administration in general, they have abandoned the "reality based" community. Foreign policy for these people becomes a matter of faith, not analysis of fact.

Second, Buckley's first principles, outlined above, have little or nothing to do with the American ideals Buckley likens them to. Whether or not we would succeed in training Iraqis to cope with insurgents has nothing to do with America's first principles which, in part, include tolerance for divergent points of view, belief in the ultimate soundness of democratic decisions made by an informed populace, and respect for the rights of the individual. They have nothing whatever to do with training militias.

Perhaps Buckley's first "postulate" can be stretched and massaged to sound something like these American ideals, but it takes a good deal of stretching and massaging. There are all kinds of reasons why the Iraqi people, with their tribal differences, could not suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom. None of them in any way threaten the foundation of American ideals.

First and foremost, the impetus for the introduction of democracy in Iraq did not come from within Iraq -- it was imposed on it from outside.

Somehow, I don't think we Americans would have been that happy if the French had invaded the colonies, thrown out the English rulers, and imposed a French style "democracy" here, based on a French-style constitution, written by long-term exiles from the colonies hand-picked by the French, relying on Napoleonic law (which, of course, didn't exist then) instead of the English common law, while simultaneously fortifying Pittsburgh (Ft. Duquesne) and other areas around the country to become permanent French military bases. Add to that repeated insults, up to and including killings and torture, to the "boobish" local population by the "cultured" French, the theft of enormous sums intended to rebuild the country from the destruction of war, and the inability of the French to prevent attacks by the Native Americans on towns and outposts near the wilderness, and I suspect we would have welcomed King George back with open arms.