Timothy Burke has a crie de coeur looking at all the ways in which the Bush administration has taken steps in Iraq and the war on terror that undermine and destroy its stated goals. He is a far more eloquent writer than I am, and he blogs more rarely but with more effort on each piece - the overall effect powerful.

Burke opens his piece by replying to the people who argued that anyone who opposed the invasion of Iraq was in favor of Saddam Hussein's petit-Stalinism.

There is a struggle against terror, injustice, illiberalism. It is real. It will be with us all our lives. We must fight it as best we can. The people who backed the war in Iraq, especially the people who backed it uncritically, unskeptically, ideologically, who still refuse to be skeptical, who refuse to exact a political price for it, who refuse to learn the lessons it has taught, sabotaged that struggle. Some of them like to accuse their critics of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Right back at you, then. You bungled, and you don’t even have the grace or authentic commitment to your alleged aims to confess your error.

Everyone believes in the need to defend liberty, but Burke argues that the Bushies' policies have weakened liberty around the world while claiming to protect it, and that they have done so not just by misrepresenting the purpose of the war, not just by going in with a plan for a fast victory and no plan for a transition, but by the very nature of their attempt.

Liberalism and democracy do not come from formalisms slapped down on top of social landscape: they come from the small covenants of everyday life, and rise from those towards formalisms which guarantee and extend their benefits rigorously and predictably. Constitutions, laws, procedures: these are important. But they cannot be unpacked from a box alongside a shipment of MREs and dispensed by soldiers. They do not make a liberal society by themselves.

Instead, Burke argues, the process of teaching how to become a liberal society requires that the teachers expose themselves to the locals, showing by example what an open society means. And, by the very nature of this activity, this makes the teachers vulnerable to any opposition within the society. He identifies a paradox - you must open the door in order to teach democracy, close it in order to survive your stint as instructor.

I had a slightly different take on the humanitarian argument about the Iraq invasion - I argue that for a major American international intervention to be politically successful it must meet two distinct criteria: it must be a plausible humanitarian or just war action, and it must clearly serve America's realpolitik interests. One only, and that dog won't hunt.

So, Iraq can be explained as a humanitarian effort to rid the world of a brutal petty Stalinist. That is a good deed - he is not the worst leader in the world but he certainly makes the top twenty and anything that overthrows anyone in the top twenty and replaces them with something better is a good thing.

Iraq was also explained as a crucial step in the global war against terror, by a number of different justifications. Unfortunately, the war plan was focused on getting to Baghdad, not on achieving post-war policy goals, and the whole process is in danger of collapsing on realpolitik grounds.

What next? Unfortunately credibility is like groundwater - it accumulates slowly over time but can be drawn down and spent very quickly. I don't want to just wring my hands and say this is terrible, but I also want to have a day and will stop writing at this point. More later, next time I want to do some blogging to jump start my writing day.

Posted by Red Ted at May 7, 2004 09:06 AM | TrackBack