Prometheus 6

[TS] Onward Cautious Soldiers
By DAVID BROOKS

The conservative mansion has many rooms.

In one chamber there are the resurgent Burkeans. These conservatives, led by George F. Will, are suspicious of grand plans to transform regions. They know that societies are infinitely complex organisms, that our ability to understand reality is limited and that efforts to initiate change can produce unintended consequences.

In another chamber are the staunch Churchillians. They know that occasionally civilization is confronted by enemies so ideologically extreme and so greedy for domination that decent nations must use military power to confront and defeat them. So Bill Kristol argues the U.S. has no choice but to strike the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

The mysogenist anti-abortionists are in the back alley...

And these days the conservative mansion is a fractious place. My friend George has decided to go after my friend Bill, and we all look forward to the day when his arguments catch up to his sarcasm.

Okay, that dis had the significance of a member of Elijah Muhammad's N.O.I. calling someone a hypocrite.

But I wonder if amid all the din there might be a room, even just a utility closet, for those of us in yet another rightward sect, the neocon incrementalists. Those of us in this burgeoning movement — numbering so far in the low single digits — are squishy Solomons.

We believe that on one level the Burkeans are right. The troubles in Iraq have confirmed their warnings about the unpredictability of social engineering. But nonetheless they are also wrong. We can’t just let reckless tyrannies dominate the Middle East on the supposed grounds the region is not yet ready for freedom.

We also believe that on one level the Churchillians are right too. Iran really is an intractable menace to world peace. Can anybody imagine how terrified we would be if the Iranian fundamentalists already had the bomb, and the ability to incinerate Israel at this moment of high tension? But the Churchillians are also rash to want to send bombers over Tehran and try to solve our problems all at once.

We neoincrementalists have kept our democratic dreams, but we’ve slowed our gait to a cautious walk.

...and as wrong as all of it has turned out, there's no thought that maybe the whole enterprise was an error.