Watch Me Surprise You...

...by saying that Jonah Goldberg frankly nails it in his column on NRO today.


That's sarcasm, of course. Me praising Jonah would be about as counterintuitive a move as Morat over at Skeptical Notion praising Atrios or some such. Goldberg is a conservative, and so pretty much am I.


I know this. You know this. I know you know I know you know, etc.


Why, then?


Because I think it points out something very serious about the differences between liberals and conservatives, and why electing our current imperfectly conservative president remains a priority.


Jonah's column, summed up succinctly, says that war is a difficult enterprise. It nearly never goes according to plan. There's always an unexpected factor to contend with. Someone nearly always screws up, and in an ugly and spectacular manner. The enemy nearly always finds a way to disrupt your strategy somewhere along the line. Iraq is no exception.


Now, liberals think this about war, because liberals don't like war, and liberals like the kind of macho confidence that people begin a war with even less. The argument that war is a process of bloody miscalculations is one that liberals are happy to throw into the teeth of both war and machismo.


But conservatives know that the above is true about war, because conservatives read about and study war. One hesitates to generalize, but I think its fair to say that liberals want to know how to avoid war, and conservatives want to know how to win it. Conservatives, being conservatives, know that war is not something that's going to go away as long as humanity has something to argue about, and they also know that humans have a nearly infinite capacity to find things to argue about. Therefore, they want to know how wars are fought and won, what mistakes can be avoided and what mistakes probably can't, so that when war comes they will be ready.


If the above is true, and I think it is, it goes a long way toward explaining why conservatives have been so patient in Iraq and the WoT in general and liberals so changeable and skittish. Since 9/11, conservatives have been the ones saying "this will take years," and "Afghanistan is only the beginning," and "there is still much to do." Liberals, on the other hand, have been declaring quagmire since the first week of the Afghanistan campaign. I don't think this is an accident. Conservatives know that the fortunes of war are mutable, and liberals think anything more difficult than Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland in '36 is the prelude to defeat. They simply don't know any better.


Of course, there is the fact that the WoT is being led by an arguably conservative Republican President. I don't discount this. Were the situation reversed, the paleocons and Buchananites might be a much bigger voice on the right than they are today. But while I can't speak for anybody else, I can say without hesitation that if Al Gore had won in 2000, and if Al Gore had responded to 9/11 by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, by putting Syria, Iran, North Korea, and the PLO on notice that their malfeasance would no longer be tolerated, by following bipartisan recommendations to revamp our intelligence community, then Al Gore would have my vote in 2004. Al Gore being Al Gore, he probably would have went about things differently, but if I saw a serious, aggressive war on terrorism and terrorist states, then I'd have to be really impressed with any challenger before I got rid of him. I believe many in the blogosphere would feel similarly.


There's also the possibility that Al Gore would have made a bunch of threatening noises and done very little. Alternative histories can't be nailed down by definition. But the point is, a centrist Democrat who was willing to take the fight to the enemy might have found a great deal more support on the right than one might think, maybe more support on the right than the left. After all, in England, the Tories have been rock-steady on Iraq since day one.