When He’s Right, He’s Right

Atrios cherry-picked the best stuff, but George Will’s conclusion (sniping at the “blogosphere” aside) seems worth quoting as well:

The official is correct that it is wrong “to think that somehow we are responsible — that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies.” But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere think like that. It is more dismaying that someone at the center of government considers it clever to talk like that. It is the language of foreign policy — and domestic politics — unrealism.

Foreign policy “realists” considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists’ critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.

Several decades ago, before his work turned empirically shoddy and normatively reprehensible, Samuel Huntington wrote a very important book called Political Order in Changing Societies. In a nutshell, the argument of the book is that the most important distinction to be drawn among political orders is not between, say, liberal and authoritarian states, but between states that can effectively govern and those that cannot: “[t]he most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.” To be clear, he was not arguing that the United States and the 60s-era Soviet Union were in any way comparably desirable forms of government. But as an empirical matter, countries with effective states have more in common than states and de facto non-states.

Of course, Huntington’s insight can cut both ways normatively. It can certainly justify the dark side of realism, the “at least they’re our bastards” school. Still, it is an important insight, and one that the Iraq war’s defenders–and especially those who defended it in liberal terms–completely lost sight of. (You know, the kind of people who can insist with a straight face that “I don’t consider myself to be that credulous” but that “It’s quite extraordinary to see the way that American soldiers are welcomed” and “there is a really intelligent political program as well as a very tough military one.”) It’s tempting to argue that when a regime is as bad as Saddam’s, anything has to be an improvement. Tempting, but wrong. Even for Iraqis–and especially for women–a theocratic quasi-state that relies on local militias for effective social control may be even worse, and certainly isn’t a significant improvement. And in terms of American interests, even without considering the opportunity costs an Iraq without an effective state is far, far worse than the status quo ante. It would be really nice if Hussein could be replaced with a workable state that was more liberal, but you can’t just assume that will happen as night follows day–it’s an extremely difficult task. And one that the Bush administration, which seems to have had as little sense about the magnitude of the difficulty as its most abject apologists, was spectacularly ill-equipped to make work.