The Liberal Failure of Iraq
Mike Dorf's recent excellent post on Souter's retirement and the changing nature of conservatism in the U.S. has caused me to consider the manner in which the entire Iraq experiment has appeared to be a reverse of what one might expect, with conservatism having morphed into something odd and unfamiliar, and at the same time my fellow liberals having shamefully betrayed core principles that might well be put to good use in Iraq in pursuit of their own narrow political agenda. Legal doctrine is certainly subordinate to ideological disposition in determining legal outcomes, as I have long noted, but sometimes it seems, as Iraq seems to reveal, ideological disposition is itself subordinate to short term political advantage.
If we start with conservatism, traditionally it is highly suspicious of the ability of human beings to use reason and force of will to effect positive change in society, as per Burke's criticisms of the French Revolution, which help to form the intellectual underpinnings of the modern conservative movement. Unintended consequences, as well as the limits of human predictability, are emphasized as being the result of massive change, and the values of predictability, certainty and stability are put forward as reasons to maintain the status quo. In addition, there is sort of a cynicism of human nature and human society being able to effect very much change very quickly. A friend and scholar of Burke once pointed out to me correctly that I've spent 5 years trying to lose 35 pounds and failing. If I can't do that, what makes me think people are going to undergo massive social change easily, comfortably and without consequence? The analogy is a bit facile, but nonetheless I've always valued that form of conservatism, not because I adopt it, but because I think it's good to have that noodge, that skeptic telling you that you are trying to do too much too quickly, that whatever you are thinking is not going to work. One must listen to that voice, even the liberal, because it is an undeniable truth that some appalling horrors have happened to the world in the name of effecting massive change. Pol Pot's Year Zero, Mao's Great Leap Forward are two examples where some messianic and maniacal dictator got it into his head that he could fix the world in an instant, and killed millions and ruined a nation in the process.
So to that conservative, change should be gradual and incremental, and delivered only when necessary. That would necessarily lead to some level of skepticism about a large government, and an extensive regulatory state, of course, but the reason for that is because large governments assume that they can somehow control events well by planning an economy or a car company, and the conservative doesn't really believe people can do that. It is a resounding "No we can't", a belief that if you think you can change the world in some grand fashion, you're probably just deluding, and flattering, yourself, and it's likely to turn out pretty badly.
But what began as skepticism on government as a consequence of favoring status quo over rapid change seemed in the context of Iraq to have turned into some grand messianic belief that smaller governments are going to ipso facto bring about peace and prosperity. So all of a sudden the consequence of conservatism became its cause--massive change WAS okay, so long as it brought about private markets and minimal regulation. And in fact, if you did it quickly, all the better. Somehow the suspicion that people don't change that quickly, that if you start messing too much with what is, you end up doing more harm than good, that it is an arrogant and fundamental falsehood that really smart people can somehow make the world better in an instant, disappeared. And these folks with their messianic beliefs in remaking the world without unintended consequence and human folly and limited abilities of predictability, and their complete contempt for the core conservative values of predictability, certainty, and stability, threw out a legal system and tried to do something more in core with the messianic beliefs--small government, limited regulation and the like, and failed entirely miserably.
This helped move the Republican Party to the wilderness where they seem likely to remain for some time, but I don't think it signalled a death knell to conservatism. In fact, one could argue that it is a pretty good example for conservatives in the more traditional sense to highlight--you can't just go to a goat farmer, tell him he's liberated, show him the way to the stock market and expect him to go trade futures. That's dumb. No idea what happens when you try to just deregulate the whole place, the Burkean might say, but it's probably bad, and in any event unpredictable and aren't we better with what we have. It wasn't the Republican way, but it's not clear to me that the Republican way was really the conservative way. When Buckley said he'd rather be led by the first 400 people in the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty, yes it was a dig at the Harvard faculty, but I think it was also intended as a traditional conservative's skepticism that smart people can just go about fixing the world and his conviction that their arrogance will do more harm than good. I don't think he meant, as was the Republican approach in Iraq, that you can just replace the Harvard faculty with the Heritage Foundation, let THEM govern, and it's the way to go.
But there's another side to it, which is that we liberals ironically throughout the entire Iraq period, really from the outset to now, have been saying things that are almost entirely at odds with our own convictions, and in fact better representations of conservative values than liberal. "Yes we can" is hardly what you hear from the left on Iraq, it's "get the hell out, the damn thing is hopeless." The notion that America can effect change in Iraq is met with extreme skepticism.
At some level, it is fair for liberals to say that their belief in "yes we can" doesn't mean we can do anything anywhere anytime, and so therefore the Iraq experiment was too much. But that's a copout, because the fact is that any change, no matter how incremental, is viewed as a necessary failure in Iraq, and as something that won't work. The left declared the surge a failure an hour after it begun, and even after this prediction was proven demonstrably wrong, indicated that perhaps it led to increased security, but it didn't lead to political compromise. This, it was said , was impossible. Then when people like me join projects intended to help Iraqis revise the constitution and achieve greater levels of consensus, the response from the left has been generally derision, and a belief that the whole thing is impossible because there have been no compromises to date. There is a govenment, operating under a constitution, and passing laws, and somehow we're supposed to believe that nobody has compromised to make this happen. When certain questions are delayed, the left has emphasized them. Every gain in security force capability is matched by the left's insistence that they remain generally unprepared. Every legislative achievement is countered by the fact that really hard questions remain. There is a smugness in this, a determination to see failure, and I think almost a secret desire to see it, to demonstrate that George W. Bush was wrong about Iraq, which I guess makes them right.
Look, they might be right, only an idiot would see the parties are too intransigient at this point to make a final solution on very pressing problems possible,and that everything from corruption to infrastructure degradation make it a hard case to believe in. However, in being right, they are on the right, in the sense that gone, in the context of Iraq, is the belief that any good might be done by America, even with a Democrat in office. Gone is the Ghandian sense that one must be the change one seeks, replaced with leave them to fight among themselves. Gone is the faith, and the hope, and the concomitant sense that in Iraq there are 25 million human beings and let's see if there is anything we can do because we can do great things, replaced with the more cynical notion that the nation cannot be saved.
If it was because of a change in conviction, that is they believed in "yes we can" saw Iraq and realized that was a mistake, it would be one thing. I don't think it is, certainly most of my friends on the left don't think that in any number of other contexts. I think it's far more sinister. I think it is the left's attempt to assuage itself, and to comfort itself, into doing nothing, so that Iraq might fail, and George W. Bush might be proven once and for all wrong, So we tell ourselves we can't, and in so doing adopt a set of conservative values that, if applied to anything from the stimulus package to cap and trade carbon emissions, we would be horrified by. Iraqi human beings aren't the point, our faith in ourselves to help Iraqi human beings aren't the point, George Bush is the point. And that's not just sad, it's outright shameful.
Naturally, there are exceptions. It isn't Obama's policy, at least for the coming year. A better exception would be the US Embassy now, or at least those I work with, who are overwhelmingly fellow liberals, dedicated and believing that "yes we can" make a difference, and we must, given the consequences if we don't. The point isn't what America did or didn't do right earlier to these people, it's to help set things right now, with the faith and hope that we can. So I'd urge my friends on the left, to try whenever they hear of the daunting challenges in Iraq, whenever they learn of policy changes or steps forward or back, whenever Obama announces an effort to try to do something of good for the 25 million souls whose well being is 25 billion times more important than whether or not George W. Bush was right or wrong, to try out these three simple words, the mantra of the American left:
Yes.
We.
Can.
HAH
If we start with conservatism, traditionally it is highly suspicious of the ability of human beings to use reason and force of will to effect positive change in society, as per Burke's criticisms of the French Revolution, which help to form the intellectual underpinnings of the modern conservative movement. Unintended consequences, as well as the limits of human predictability, are emphasized as being the result of massive change, and the values of predictability, certainty and stability are put forward as reasons to maintain the status quo. In addition, there is sort of a cynicism of human nature and human society being able to effect very much change very quickly. A friend and scholar of Burke once pointed out to me correctly that I've spent 5 years trying to lose 35 pounds and failing. If I can't do that, what makes me think people are going to undergo massive social change easily, comfortably and without consequence? The analogy is a bit facile, but nonetheless I've always valued that form of conservatism, not because I adopt it, but because I think it's good to have that noodge, that skeptic telling you that you are trying to do too much too quickly, that whatever you are thinking is not going to work. One must listen to that voice, even the liberal, because it is an undeniable truth that some appalling horrors have happened to the world in the name of effecting massive change. Pol Pot's Year Zero, Mao's Great Leap Forward are two examples where some messianic and maniacal dictator got it into his head that he could fix the world in an instant, and killed millions and ruined a nation in the process.
So to that conservative, change should be gradual and incremental, and delivered only when necessary. That would necessarily lead to some level of skepticism about a large government, and an extensive regulatory state, of course, but the reason for that is because large governments assume that they can somehow control events well by planning an economy or a car company, and the conservative doesn't really believe people can do that. It is a resounding "No we can't", a belief that if you think you can change the world in some grand fashion, you're probably just deluding, and flattering, yourself, and it's likely to turn out pretty badly.
But what began as skepticism on government as a consequence of favoring status quo over rapid change seemed in the context of Iraq to have turned into some grand messianic belief that smaller governments are going to ipso facto bring about peace and prosperity. So all of a sudden the consequence of conservatism became its cause--massive change WAS okay, so long as it brought about private markets and minimal regulation. And in fact, if you did it quickly, all the better. Somehow the suspicion that people don't change that quickly, that if you start messing too much with what is, you end up doing more harm than good, that it is an arrogant and fundamental falsehood that really smart people can somehow make the world better in an instant, disappeared. And these folks with their messianic beliefs in remaking the world without unintended consequence and human folly and limited abilities of predictability, and their complete contempt for the core conservative values of predictability, certainty, and stability, threw out a legal system and tried to do something more in core with the messianic beliefs--small government, limited regulation and the like, and failed entirely miserably.
This helped move the Republican Party to the wilderness where they seem likely to remain for some time, but I don't think it signalled a death knell to conservatism. In fact, one could argue that it is a pretty good example for conservatives in the more traditional sense to highlight--you can't just go to a goat farmer, tell him he's liberated, show him the way to the stock market and expect him to go trade futures. That's dumb. No idea what happens when you try to just deregulate the whole place, the Burkean might say, but it's probably bad, and in any event unpredictable and aren't we better with what we have. It wasn't the Republican way, but it's not clear to me that the Republican way was really the conservative way. When Buckley said he'd rather be led by the first 400 people in the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty, yes it was a dig at the Harvard faculty, but I think it was also intended as a traditional conservative's skepticism that smart people can just go about fixing the world and his conviction that their arrogance will do more harm than good. I don't think he meant, as was the Republican approach in Iraq, that you can just replace the Harvard faculty with the Heritage Foundation, let THEM govern, and it's the way to go.
But there's another side to it, which is that we liberals ironically throughout the entire Iraq period, really from the outset to now, have been saying things that are almost entirely at odds with our own convictions, and in fact better representations of conservative values than liberal. "Yes we can" is hardly what you hear from the left on Iraq, it's "get the hell out, the damn thing is hopeless." The notion that America can effect change in Iraq is met with extreme skepticism.
At some level, it is fair for liberals to say that their belief in "yes we can" doesn't mean we can do anything anywhere anytime, and so therefore the Iraq experiment was too much. But that's a copout, because the fact is that any change, no matter how incremental, is viewed as a necessary failure in Iraq, and as something that won't work. The left declared the surge a failure an hour after it begun, and even after this prediction was proven demonstrably wrong, indicated that perhaps it led to increased security, but it didn't lead to political compromise. This, it was said , was impossible. Then when people like me join projects intended to help Iraqis revise the constitution and achieve greater levels of consensus, the response from the left has been generally derision, and a belief that the whole thing is impossible because there have been no compromises to date. There is a govenment, operating under a constitution, and passing laws, and somehow we're supposed to believe that nobody has compromised to make this happen. When certain questions are delayed, the left has emphasized them. Every gain in security force capability is matched by the left's insistence that they remain generally unprepared. Every legislative achievement is countered by the fact that really hard questions remain. There is a smugness in this, a determination to see failure, and I think almost a secret desire to see it, to demonstrate that George W. Bush was wrong about Iraq, which I guess makes them right.
Look, they might be right, only an idiot would see the parties are too intransigient at this point to make a final solution on very pressing problems possible,and that everything from corruption to infrastructure degradation make it a hard case to believe in. However, in being right, they are on the right, in the sense that gone, in the context of Iraq, is the belief that any good might be done by America, even with a Democrat in office. Gone is the Ghandian sense that one must be the change one seeks, replaced with leave them to fight among themselves. Gone is the faith, and the hope, and the concomitant sense that in Iraq there are 25 million human beings and let's see if there is anything we can do because we can do great things, replaced with the more cynical notion that the nation cannot be saved.
If it was because of a change in conviction, that is they believed in "yes we can" saw Iraq and realized that was a mistake, it would be one thing. I don't think it is, certainly most of my friends on the left don't think that in any number of other contexts. I think it's far more sinister. I think it is the left's attempt to assuage itself, and to comfort itself, into doing nothing, so that Iraq might fail, and George W. Bush might be proven once and for all wrong, So we tell ourselves we can't, and in so doing adopt a set of conservative values that, if applied to anything from the stimulus package to cap and trade carbon emissions, we would be horrified by. Iraqi human beings aren't the point, our faith in ourselves to help Iraqi human beings aren't the point, George Bush is the point. And that's not just sad, it's outright shameful.
Naturally, there are exceptions. It isn't Obama's policy, at least for the coming year. A better exception would be the US Embassy now, or at least those I work with, who are overwhelmingly fellow liberals, dedicated and believing that "yes we can" make a difference, and we must, given the consequences if we don't. The point isn't what America did or didn't do right earlier to these people, it's to help set things right now, with the faith and hope that we can. So I'd urge my friends on the left, to try whenever they hear of the daunting challenges in Iraq, whenever they learn of policy changes or steps forward or back, whenever Obama announces an effort to try to do something of good for the 25 million souls whose well being is 25 billion times more important than whether or not George W. Bush was right or wrong, to try out these three simple words, the mantra of the American left:
Yes.
We.
Can.
HAH
I like your attempts to link Republican and Democratic views on Iraq to the deeper philosophy behind conservatism and liberalism. It was clear from the outside that perhaps the strongest, most profound and ultimately correct critique of the war was a conservative one (apart from an anti-imperialist critique which doesn't really intersect the liberal/conservative debate). That critique being: don't invoke ideology, don't invoke first principles, don't invoke abstract rhetoric about democracy and freedom, look at the actual social context you are hoping to acquire and tinker at your peril. Or Powell's "you broke it you bought it." It reveals the phony and opportunistic nature of the so-called conservative movement in America that almost nobody made that argument and those who did were shunned or pilloried.
However, I don't quite see what this has to do with present policy. Liberals don't say that IRAQIS should go back to Saddamism. They don't say that IRAQIS shouldn't aspire to create a new constitutional order. They don't say "well we have learned that Arabs aren't ready for democracy after all." They say: "we f*cked up, we have no business being there, we cannot remake Iraqi law and politics, the most we can or should do is play some sort of security guarantor role." As a political theorist, I don't think that has much to do with the Burke vs. Rationalism debate.
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Thanks, and sorry for the delay, I've been rather busy here in Baghdad.
As to your comment, it isn't my view that the liberal vision of the world necessitates the type of isolationism you are implying. That is to say, whether it is Kosovo or Somalia, a question of aid budgets or of linking progress on human rights to trade treaties, the left to my mind very much believes that there is a vision of the world, and the dignity of the human individual in it, that the United States has not only the right but in fact the duty, to promote. And so I think if a question did arise as to tripling, say, the amount of foreign aid that went to Egypt or Saudi to promote women's rights, ir supporting Au Sang Suu Kyi, or Pakistani lawyers or Saad Eddine Ibrahim the left wouldn't and doesn't say "this is f*cked up, we have no business being there, we cannot remake other nations' law and politics," etc. I think the left would be all for it, and for doing what the US could to advance particular normative views associated with liberalism. Therefore, in terms of present policy, where Iraq is a sovereign nation, where its Council of Representatives advances its own agenda, where all the US can do is provide support, and where the vision of the Iraqi government is far more consonant of notions of liberalism than anything in the region (just look at the Constitution), it's a little disappointing that rather than support US efforts to support a fragile but very real democracy, all the left wants to do is show how bad things are, how impossible and pointless US efforts are, and how it would be best to leave Iraqis to fend for themselves.
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It wasn't my view either that liberalism necessitates that kind of isolationism. Rather, it was my point that present day liberal views on Iraqi policy 6 years after the invasion don't necessarily *imply* those kinds of philosophical commitments you were discussing. At their best, these are pragmatic debates about what *US foreign policy* is actually capable of accomplishing by way of the transformation of other societies or their governments informed by events of the past decade, not philosophical debates about what *humans* are capable of changing and improving.
Yes, there is a greater ambivalence about using aid or pressure to change foreign societies, especially ones with a history of being colonized, especially ones where the practices in question have religious or "cultural" rationales (as opposed to the Burmese junta's efforts at self-preservation). However, it is important to keep in mind how this ambivalence springs not just from a form of isolationism, or cultural disdain ("Arabs just aren't capable of democracy"), or pessimism, or Kissingerian realism, but from other equally strong liberal/leftist commitments. I am not saying you are wrong about what the "left" in the US ought to support in Iraq, Egypt, Saudi, Pakistan or Burma. I am suggesting that the philosophical foundations of left-liberalism push and pull in multiple, mutually conflicting directions.
Of course, that is a separate question on the present day attitude or political culture of people who oppose Bush - which I can imagine must be horribly frustrating for someone like you who is in the daily business of actual institution building.
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I see your point, though let me dispense with the religious and cultural ambivalence, as I do not think that is the point any longer. America might hope for a liberal personal status law, they might meet with officials about it, but really, if that's the cause of anyone's ambivalence, women's rights or cultural interference, it's a little dated. The goal at this point is to avoid widespread bloodshed and catastrophe and strengthen civic institutions, in a manner that is hardly controversial in Iraq. In that context, I think the argument that foreign policy can achieve little has to be tied to some degree to a belief that humans don't change that easily. They may want civic institutions, the argument has to run, they all seem to, but they can't get over their sectarian hatreds much as they try and so it's hopeless.I tend to see that view as a conservative one, and as one deeply held by the left. And I think it's inspired by an irrational hatred of George Bush (irrational in that it extends into areas where it cannot rationally extend--he's sleeping comfortably in Crawford no matter what happens). And I think that's awful.
H
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