Timothy Garton Ash, at The Guardian:

What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration’s policy towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.

To sum up:

So here’s the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse and worse.

I would disagree with the author on one point, however:

On the credit side, all we have to show is Libya’s renunciation of weapons of mass destruction…

While I’m sure the Bush Administration deserves some credit for this, just by virtue of being in power when it happened (kind of like Reagan and the USSR), Libya’s ‘renunciation’ was not provoked by a fear of invasion. They’d been making steps for years towards rejoining the international community out of economic self interest, and this was just one of the final steps. It would have happened with or without the Iraq occupation.

David Willets, in the Guardian, talks about why he drifted away from libertarianism. While he may have ended up in a somewhat different place than I did, his reasoning is familiar:

Willetts says he realized that particular shortcoming in modern Conservative thought as a result of his own personal experience. As a young man he was a libertarian, “but when you get older - particularly when you have kids - you suddenly start thinking, ‘Well, I don’t actually want drugs being traded outside the school gates. I do care about what’s broadcast on TV. I do worry about the kind of society my children are going to live in. I do worry about the environment, because, long after I’ve gone, I don’t want to feel that the Arctic ice cap is melting and that half of Britain is flooded.’ Someone described a libertarian as being someone in favor of childless immortals. My personal and autobiographical definition of conservatism is a free marketeer with children.

Emphasis mine. Its glib and dismissive, but I think its a pretty accurate insult. The more you think about it, the more absurd libertarianism becomes as an system for organizing large and complex societies. He continues, talking about what he feels are (or should be) the two basic principles of modern conservatism in Britain:

…there are two key emotions that people feel in modern Britain. One is the value of personal freedom, of personal choice, of trust in other people and a wariness about the state’s ability to make us good, or the state’s ability to solve problems. All this tends towards an empowering of the individual. Secondly - this is the bit which is much harder to express - there’s a belief, or an understanding, that there is more to life than an individual’s acts of consumption and choice strung together. An understanding that you have ties to your family, ties to your neighborhood, ties to your society. An understanding that you have obligations, and that public service matters.

I suppose the second part is what he would say delineates a conservative from a libertarian, the idea that you do have an inescapable obligation to your family and your community that takes precedence over your personal desires. We are not little gods, created out of nothing and owing nothing. However, I would just argue that this is not really specifically a conservative idea. Certainly not one that separates it from the majority of political movements or broad human thinking.

via Clive at the Daily Dish.

-Matthew

From CNN:

Although the White House had initially suggested that Bush would deliver his speech on Iraq strategy before Christmas, he has decided to delay it until early next year.

Defending that decision, Bush said, “I will not be rushed into making a difficult decision … a necessary decision.”

I just finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (which I plan on writing more about), and one of the central themes is the contrast between men who made critical and painful decisions in time, and those that did not or could not and led their men to annihilation. In World War I, there was an equal abundance both of men who rose to the leadership challenges of the war and those whose arrogance, ignorance, indecision and stupidity led directly to death and suffering on a catastrophic level.

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I find this conversation posted on Hugh Hewitt’s blog to be extremely valuable in highlighting the delusion that seems central to neoconservative worldviews. From Victor Davis Hanson, who is supposedly a historian, on WW II and Iraq:

Remember this is a view…they’re talking about a country that once fought Italy, Japan and Germany all at once, defeated them, and then turned around and started the Cold War…I mean, the Cold War resistance of the Soviet Union, and they’re saying that this same country, now twice the size, with much more material and military wealth, can’t fight in Afghanistan and Iraq at once. That’s sort of the poverty of their imagination, that we’ve taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, got bogged down in Iraq, and now we’re helpless. We need Jim Baker to come in, we need Syria to come in, we need Iran to come in to help us. It’s absurd, but it seems to be the prevailing opinion now.

Let me say first that I don’t really know anything about Mr. Hanson aside from this statement and what I could gleam from his wikipedia entry. But if this statement isn’t a misquote or taken wildly out of context, then its both a pretty crazy point of view and one that is unfortunately not uncommon in this country.

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