Dark Days for Bush Doctrine

Charles Kesler from the Claremont Institute has just about the best overview of the rise and fall of the Bush Doctrine, anywhere. He traces its intellectual and spiritual roots to the assumptions and the contradictions of the Necon movement, and he explains the dilemma we face in the war against Islamic jihadism, in Iraq and beyond.

July 16, 2007

Iraq and the Neoconservatives

By Charles Kesler

As its new counterinsurgency strategy takes hold, the Bush Administration regards the war in Iraq with guarded optimism, pointing to encouraging signs that the "surge" is working or at least beginning to work. Baghdad appears to have pulled back from the edge of civil war. In Al Anbar province, local tribesmen have turned away from al-Qaeda and other foreign jihadists, and staked their future, at least temporarily, on cooperation with the Americans and the elected Iraqi government. The new Iraqi military and police forces are more numerous and better trained than ever, and suffer no shortage of recruits despite their predictable decimation by suicide bombers.

Even as the military tide in Iraq may be turning, however, political support in America for the war has reached new lows. ...

This is a long article, but it is required reading.

The optimism concerning the power of politics to shape culture that the Neocons take from Aristotle and Tocqueville overlooks the organic nature of the relationship. The influences within a "regime" are reciprocal and evolutionary, and so slow to develop. And develoment must take place on organic principles, not flown in idealism. They would have done well, the Kristols and the Fukyamas, to have read more Aquinas along with their Aristotle and Tocquevile, or their Weber and Strauss. Maybe they should have also listened more to the moral realism of Lincoln, and less to the moral idealism of Wilson. Man's sinful nature is not likely to be concquered any time soon by the clarion call of liberal democracy.

D. Ox

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