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Iraq Election: A Teachable Moment?

by Christopher Chantrill
January 30, 2005 at 5:31 pm

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TODAY THE Iraq election is over and Senator John Kerry is wisely advising that:

No one in the United States should try to over-hype this election… This election is a sort of demarcation point, and what really counts now is the effort to have a legitimate political reconciliation that is going to take a massive diplomatic effort and a much more significant outreach to the international community than this administration has been willing to engage in.

Quite right, Senator. I couldn’t agree more. To translate from Mandarin into English: the election was a stunning success and we elite Bush-haters are going to have to mount a massive international operation to make sure that Bush doesn’t get the credit.

On Democratic Underground they are wailing: “Where are the freedom fighters today?” But the Iraq The Model chappies speak of “tears of happiness, hope, pride and triumph.”

Then there’s this quote from a Sunni voter in Falluja: “We want to be like other Iraqis, we don´t want to always be in opposition.” Translation: We quit.

The real danger of the Iraq election is that it might turn out to be a great teachable moment—for liberals, of course. They might get it, at long last. But, given the reaction of the quintessential Sixties liberal, Senator Kerry, and the lefties at Democratic Underground it looks as though the moment will pass. This is good for conservatives and other Americans.

The teachable lesson from Iraq is that this isn’t a very nice world. It’s a world full of conflict and killing in which there is often no option but grinding it out on the ground. War is the norm, and peace is the pause that refreshes. But in our modern era, it is easy to lose sight of this. Back in the good old days of wise aboriginal tribes that were close to nature about 40 percent of men died from violent conflict. But in the twentieth century, an era we like to imagine as the very abyss of violence and war, only five percent of men died from violent conflict.

Our modern American elite has lived a life peculiarly free from conflict. Its defining moment of conflict was opposing the Vietnam War. But its battle was never a real war. Anti-war activists were cosseted and encouraged by their liberal parents and the liberal media and indulgently made into heroes for striking a few elegant poses. Then they bravely took up arms against their liberal professors who were quite happy to cave in and grant all their demands without even the pretence of a fight. In consequence, our liberal elites imagine that everything can be decided with a telegenic demonstration and a TV-friendly spokesperson, or failing that, diplomacy and a peace process.

You can tell that liberals don’t have a clue about conflict by listening to their commentary on the war on terror. They are easily discouraged, and make every setback into a frightening quagmire. But any student of war knows that every conflict is a confusing and demoralizing grind that often seems to be an exercise in futility.

Liberals are also woefully ignorant about strategy. Three years after 9/11 they are still unable to penetrate the transparent strategic moves made by the Bush administration: disengaging from Saudi Arabia, backhanding Arafat, transforming Afghanistan, and occupying the strategic hinge of the Middle East along the Mesopotamian rivers.

Liberals are ignorant of all these things because they have had everything so easy. Conservatives have learned the arts of conflict because they have had to. Starting from nothing in 1950 they have built first a cadre, then a movement, and finally a political majority, step by step, with plenty of setbacks along the way.

Liberals should be paying attention as President Bush conducts his seminar in global strategic conflict. They could be taking notes. They are going to have to learn the arts of war sooner or later as they struggle back from defeat and humiliation, for that is what is in store for them in the years ahead as the American people reject the rule of the liberal experts that has oppressed them for the last century. But it looks like they aren’t ready to pay attention yet.

This is good, because we conservatives have a lot to do. What we want, above all, is to build a self-governing America in which ordinary people get to make decisions about their lives without having to get permission from the ever-interfering liberal. We want to court our brides and get married without liberals muddying up the idea of marriage; we want to raise and educate our children without twelve years of marinating in liberal schools. And we want to deal with our doctors without liberal interference. You could encapsulate all this into a bumper sticker slogan: Smash the Liberal Veto. But that might hurt liberal self-esteem.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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