Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Iraq's Future – and Ours
- 2 The Right War for the Right Reasons
- 3 Iraq: Losing the American Way
- 4 Intervention With a Vision
- 5 An End to Illusion
- 6 Quitters
- 7 A More Humble Hawk; Crisis of Confidence
- 8 Time for Bush to See the Realities of Iraq
- 9 Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead
- 10 The Perils of Hegemony
- 11 Like It's 1999: How We Could Have Done It Right
- 12 Reality Check – This Is War; In Modern Imperialism, U.S. Needs to Walk Softly
- 13 A Time for Reckoning: Ten Lessons to Take Away from Iraq
- 14 World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win
- 15 The Neoconservative Moment
- 16 In Defense of Democratic Realism
- 17 ‘Stay the Course!’ Is Not Enough
- 18 Realism's Shining Morality
- 19 Has Iraq Weakened Us?
- 20 Democracy and the Bush Doctrine
- 21 A Time for Humility
- 22 Birth of a Democracy
- Index
6 - Quitters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Iraq's Future – and Ours
- 2 The Right War for the Right Reasons
- 3 Iraq: Losing the American Way
- 4 Intervention With a Vision
- 5 An End to Illusion
- 6 Quitters
- 7 A More Humble Hawk; Crisis of Confidence
- 8 Time for Bush to See the Realities of Iraq
- 9 Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead
- 10 The Perils of Hegemony
- 11 Like It's 1999: How We Could Have Done It Right
- 12 Reality Check – This Is War; In Modern Imperialism, U.S. Needs to Walk Softly
- 13 A Time for Reckoning: Ten Lessons to Take Away from Iraq
- 14 World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win
- 15 The Neoconservative Moment
- 16 In Defense of Democratic Realism
- 17 ‘Stay the Course!’ Is Not Enough
- 18 Realism's Shining Morality
- 19 Has Iraq Weakened Us?
- 20 Democracy and the Bush Doctrine
- 21 A Time for Humility
- 22 Birth of a Democracy
- Index
Summary
The war to depose Saddam was always an unlikely war for conservatives. Traditional conservatives tend to view most attempts at radically altering society with a good degree of skepticism. They tend to view war primarily as a means for the narrow advancement of national interest, leavened occasionally with a dollop of enlightened national self-interest. In the internal politics of the last world empire – the British one – the Tories tended to warn against the attempt to impart liberal values to “restless natives,” while the Liberals took up what was seen as the “White Man's Burden.”
Within American conservatism, there has always been an isolationist strain and a realist one balancing any liberal aspirations in foreign policy for the GOP. In retrospect, it's peculiar that such strains were so weakened in the run-up to the Iraq war. Op-ed mutterings from Brent Scowcroft were muted by his star pupil's insistence (I refer to Condi Rice) that Saddam remained a gathering threat to the United States. The far right – represented by Patrick Buchanan and the proudly protectionist and isolationist American Conservative magazine – seemed marginal at best. But there was, perhaps, always a moment when conservatism was bound to begin to resist more aggressively what is, indisputably, a liberal project of nation-building in Iraq.
Perhaps that moment has now arrived with National Review's latest Tory editorial, which makes all the right noises about seeing the conflict in Iraq through to a democratic conclusion, while laying the groundwork for a conservative argument to cut and run at the first opportunity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Right War?The Conservative Debate on Iraq, pp. 57 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005