I have been meaning for a while to comment on the striking liberal fetish for plans, but now I don’t have to since David Brooks has done so far better than I ever would have.
Here’s a challenge: try and count the times in a day or week that Bush is raked over the coals for not having a “plan” to deal with postwar Iraq. Usually these diatribes come from the same Dems who were complaining loudly about “quagmire” during the second week of what turned out to be a three week war. Anyway, you won’t be able to count, for the “no plan” criticisms by now have become countless.
I may have missed it, but I don’t recall any of these critics sharing with us the contents of the magic plan they would have had us follow or, for that matter, exactly why they think the absence of a Bush “plan” is the central explanation for what’s been happening in Iraq. Life may imitate art, but it rarely imitates a plan, especially in war.
Brooks’s column is in the form of an imaginary conversation with the conservative British political theorist Michael Oakeshott.
We can’t know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. Be aware of what you do not know. Do not go charging off to remake a society when you don’t understand its moral traditions, when you do not even understand yourself. Do not imagine that if you conquer a nation and impose something you call democracy that the results will be in any way predictable. Do not try to administer a country from behind a security bunker.
I try to reply to these warnings. I concede that government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. The Middle East could not continue down its former course.
I remind Oakeshott that he was ambivalent about the American Revolution, and dubious about a people who had made a sharp break with the past in the name of inalienable rights and other abstractions. But ours is the one revolution that worked, and it did precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn’t pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.
Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn’t even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any “plan” hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.
That’s exactly what I would have said, if I’d been able. And I would have attempted a conclusion that, in my dreams, would have approached what Brooks “said” in closing his conversation with Oakeshott:
I tell Oakeshott that the Americans and Iraqis are now involved in an Oakeshottian enterprise. They are muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions to fit the concrete realities, and that we’ll learn through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.
UPDATE
For a different view, see comments by Jacob Levy and Mark Kleiman.
