Byron York has an
interesting piece (subscription required, but gist easily
gotten from the excerpt) in World Affairs on the dog
that didn't bark after the last two elections: Republicans and
conservatives have talked about rethinking virtually every issue
that could be considered a political liability except for the
Iraq war. Even though there were predictions that this debate
would come -- York mentions criticism of the neoconservatives at
the post-election conservative gathering hosted by Brent Bozell
-- there isn't much evidence of it now.
Indeed, for all the political problems that the war in Iraq
caused for Republican candidates around the country, if you ask
virtually any group of rank-and-file conservatives what has
gone wrong with the Republican Party, a majority will point
first to out-of-control government spending. Some will say the
GOP has abandoned its core, Reaganite values. Some will rue the
party’s failure to connect with young and minority voters, and
some will say Republicans need to find better ways to address
health care, or education. But very few, if any, will mention
Iraq, or the Bush Doctrine, or the war on terror in general—the
issues most closely associated with neoconservatives.
I complained
about Iraq emerging as a litmus test issue before the primaries
(though, as it turned out, Rudy Giuliani's support for the war
did not actually make up for his social liberalism with key
primary voters). But I think there are a few reasons
conservatives haven't engaged in any rethinking of Iraq since
2006 and 2008. One is that an overwhelming majority of them
supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11, not just the neocons,
and most conservatives seem to believe that the success of the
surge in reducing violence has vindicated the entire Iraq
project. This is even more true of conservatives with foreign
policy or national defense expertise; conservatives with such
expertise or even a primary interest in foreign affairs were
strong supporters of the Iraq war. The exceptions were the
paleos, who operate almost entirely outside of the mainstream
movement, and the realists, many of whom took the Chuck Hagel
route of being lukewarm supporters of the initial invasion and
voiceiferous opponents of the surge, a combination which did not
make them look very realistic. The fact that there is no shortage
of conservatives who primarily work on tax and budget policy who
privately grumble about the war doesn't do much to shift the
intraconservative foreign-policy debate.
Ron Paul tried to launch that debate with his Republican
presidential candidacy. His antiwar views contributed to him
doing better than anyone reasonably expected when he jumped into
the race, but they also created a ceiling on his support within
Republican primaries (some of his enthusiastic young followers
were also a liability). Paul is currently more popular among
Democrats and independents in some polls than among Republicans.
Maybe a Republican whose opposition to the war was part of a less
radical critique of American foreign policy than Paul's would
have done better. But, given that the likeliest alternative was
somebody like Hagel, maybe not.
Two things have to happen before we conclude that a
Republican/conservative Iraq rethink will never happen. The first
is that George W. Bush will have to leave office. The second is
we'll have to see what happens when Barack Obama starts running
the country's foreign policy. If Obama presides over a disastrous
withdrawal from Iraq, it is unlikely that we'll see significant
Republican second thoughts about the war. If instead he stays the
course himself while engaging in numerous humanitarian
interventions around the globe, anything is possible.
