The Elephant in the Mideast (II)

Ross Douthat joins James in responding to my complaints about conservatives’ unwillingness to cop to the error of their ways in Iraq, and I pretty much agree with what both of them have to say. By the time 2008 (or 2007, or 2006, or probably 2005 even) rolled around, it was almost certainly too late for Republicans to backtrack on the war, and doubling down on the “Surge” was probably the wisest electoral strategy they had available to them: anything else would have seemed either merely affected or brazenly opportunistic, a shameless attempt to backtrack on a policy only because it became politically dangerous. (Kind of like Joe Biden and most of the Democrats, you know, but that’s another story.)

But this isn’t something I wanted to dispute, and the core of my argument was at once more backward- and more forward-looking than this: I was trying to argue, first, that the GOP’s support for the Iraq War is a huge part of what got them into this mess; and second, that in the long term it’s only by distancing themselves from the war and the approach to foreign affairs that got us into it that the party’s electoral fortunes will improve. I wasn’t trying to make a point about messaging or campaign strategy for the ‘08 cycle, but rather about how we should think about the party’s future: if Republicans continue to be known as the ones who got us into Iraq on false pretenses and never admitted they were wrong, and in particular if they continue to insist that they were right, and that the very same approaches to intelligence, diplomacy, and military intervention that got us into Iraq are the ones that should guide us going forward from here, their time in the wilderness is likely to be a lot longer than it would be if they admitted that it was time for a change.

And so the frustration that dripped from every last word of that column (“‘Noun, Verb, Surge!’ (Rinse, repeat.)”) was a product of the fact that no one will say this: the Great Conservative Recriminations War, as I think I called it, is being fought between the libertarians and the social conservatives, the business interests and the populists, the religious Right and the secularists, the spenders and the slashers, the reformists and the ditto-heads, and the neocons and … well, the neocons, since admitting that they were wrong about Iraq would require admitting that everyone was wrong about Iraq, and that it may also have been wrong to accuse the people who disagreed with them of being unpatriotic. The Republican coalition is cracking up all over the place, and yet from what I’ve seen there’s pretty much no one among the various factions who’s willing to argue that a reoriented foreign policy is an essential part of what the party needs.

Well, perhaps that’s a bit of an overstatement – there are certainly some who’ve said it, including Ross in the post linked above. (More, please!) But given the state of things it seems to me that this should be the thing that is being talked about the most, and indeed the thing about which there should be the most consensus. There are lots of reasons why the GOP is in the state it’s presently in, but the Bush administration’s disastrous foreign policy may be the failing that trumps all others: whether or not that recognition could have saved the party in 2008, I’m reasonably confident that something like it will be required if the GOP is going to return to prominence any time soon.

UPDATE: Daniel has more.

UPDATE 2: Conor makes a fair point:

… lots of Republicans who supported the Iraq War but now think it was a mistaken pin the blame on the lack of WMDs, or the ham-handed execution of the war by the Bush Administration, not on the notion that their fundamental vision of foreign policy is wrongheaded. This is why no one is willing to argue that a reoriented policy is essential. The sheer multitude of missteps in Iraq makes it easy to pin the blame for failure on any number of things other than the interventionist approach to foreign policy favored by both parties, and the increasing ease of the executive branch to take the country to war.

Okay, then. But even if a more thorough reorientation would be asking too much – and note that I said as much in the original column – why not at least admit that the supposed rationale turned out to be bogus and the execution was a mess? (That’s pretty much all that Joe Biden has said.) Even if we set the bar this low, I think that my point still stands: namely, that even this much is apparently too much for most of the movement elites among whom the debate about where to go next is going to be had. The sort of serious and open-ended consideration that’s already being given to GOP policy on taxes, spending, health care, etc. simply won’t be turned to the Iraq war, since doing that would require admitting a massive mistake on what’s become a coalition-defining issue. The GOP’s early support for the war is going to continue to hamper the party until they stop allowing it to function as a test for party orthodoxy in the ways it presently does.

Filed under: conservatism, foreign affairs, politics, war