The Folly of Attempting to Nation-Build in Iraq

John Derbyshire:

Whatever you think of the Iraq War, you can’t fairly accuse George W. Bush of lack of clarity about our war aim. That aim is, as the president has told us many times, to “stand up” an elected Iraqi government that will be able to deal with its own security problems, internal and external. And this war aim is imbedded in a larger strategic doctrine, the one we have got used to calling “neoconservatism”: to assure our own security, and to drain the swamps of jihadist terrorism, by spreading consensual, constitutional government around the Muslim Middle East (MME).

Alas, it is getting more and more difficult to find anyone who believes that this war aim is attainable by any methods we are actually willing to employ. I know a handful of such people — but then, I hang out a lot with hardcore Bush supporters. Outside those dwindling precincts, belief in a stable, independent, and democratic Iraq is fast going the way of the Hollow Earth Theory, Orgone Therapy, and Muggletonianism. The Iraq War is a bust, and its fast-sinking prospects are dragging down the whole neoconservative project with them.

All the buzz now is that neoconservatism is as dead as mutton, and that we are about to turn back to good old Nixon/Kissinger/Bush-41 realism: Let the blighters have whatever despotic, kleptocratic, homicidal, economy-destroying, women-subjugating, minority-oppressing governments they want, so long as they don’t impinge on our own national interests...

continued: National Review

update: Derbyshire expands on what he thinks a new realism should entail, in his November Diary