Barack Obama - - Riding the Horns of a Dilemma

This means that institutions are not to be treated like pieces of machinery that can be manipulated and relocated at will without consequences -— much more often than not, dire consequences.

Furthermore, the thinkers who belong to this rich intellectual line -— Edmund Burke, David Hume, James Fitzjames Stephens, F.A.Hayek, Michael Oakeshott -— know all too well that every change is accompanied by loss, and innovative change threatens a disruption of the order that makes social life tolerable. This accounts for why “prudence,” the art of selecting the least damaging of trade-offs, has always figured as a virtue in this tradition. The tradition to which I refer is “conservatism.”

I oppose the Iraq war because I am a conservative. Neither now nor ever have I doubted Bush’s motives in launching it. Nor do I question the motives of his many neo-conservative supporters whose enthusiasm for this war rivals his own. I believe that their objectives are (for the most part, at least) honorable. What I most certainly do not believe, however, is that there is any aspect of this war that commends it to the conservative disposition.

Violence may be necessary, but to unleash violence, especially of the sort characteristically found in war, for the sake of “building” a democratic society in a country to which this form of government can’t but be an alien experience, is exceedingly ambitious at best, hopelessly utopian at worst. This is the sort of endeavor to which leftists have historically been given, whether they were seeking to engage in “social engineering” at home or “nation-building” (which is just social engineering at an international level) abroad.

The question is not whether any good has come from our adventure in Iraq; some good certainly has. For that matter, even if one day the citizens of Iraq come to view themselves as “Iraqis,” as opposed, say, to Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, and even if they all become good Jeffersonian-Lockean liberals (an art form long since lost to most Americans and virtually all Europeans) and believe theirs to be a “propositional nation,” this will go no distance in negating anything that I have said. The costs in human life, in death and suffering, may not have been worth it, and ultimately, our goals must be evaluated within the context of the trade-offs that have to be made to achieve them.

The proponents of the Iraq war are incorrigibly imprudent because the Iraq war is an exercise in “nation-building” which, in turn, is “social engineering” writ large. All social engineers, whether they set their designs on their own societies or those of others, are inclined toward imprudence because they treat people and their institutions like clay that can be formed and reformed with ease. This zeal of the engineer to remake the world in his own image, though, blinds him to the disastrous results toward which his lust for perfection almost always leads him.

Obama cannot appropriate “the conservative critique” of the Iraq war, you see, because he is a social engineer. Thus, he remains trapped between the horns of his dilemma.