What's Not Wrong With the War in Iraq

In a recent Reason Magazine article, Julian Sanchez seconds Francis Fukuyama's condemnation of the neoconservatives for being too optimistic, at least about foreign affairs. Sanchez makes reference to Thomas Sowell, a conservative thinker, who came up with a rather arbitrary distinction between 'unconstrained' and 'tragic' visions. The former, mainly associated with the left, is amenable to experimenting with social transformation, the latter, mostly conservative, sees life as too complex to be changed. Unsurprisingly, Sanchez then seeks to paint the neoconservatives with the optimistic-lefty brush:

"The problems Fukuyama diagnoses with the planning of the Iraq War and its aftermath are typical of the unconstrained vision as Sowell describes it."

Sanchez has, like many others, drawn an overly conservative lesson from the chaotic Iraqi occupation. Invading Iraq was hardly a grand scheme of social transformation, so much as a romantic gesture dressed up as utopianism. Sanchez's problem is that he doesn't like the riskiness of the venture per se.

As Corey Robin pointed out in our teach-in this past Saturday, there is more than one approach to risk; we might call one the conservative and the other the progressive attitude. Right-wing romanticism has historically celebrated risk-taking for its own sake, as a heroic act of individual rejection of the conformist, risk-averse mentality of capitalist society. The 'fascistic' moment here is the celebration of the will for its own sake. Progressives, however, do not celebrate risk-taking for its own sake. Rather, they take risks for the sake of achieving some ends they think are desirable, like a more equal society, or the emancipation of a particular element of society. The problem with the neoconservative gambit, such as it was, was not that it took a risk with social engineering so much as that it was never really serious about this transformation, and the theoretical basis for their intervention was flawed (imposing democracy).

As we have argued before, this social vision is deeply anti-utopian and undemocratic anyhow. But the point is that, what really mattered to the neoconservatives seemed to be the riskiness of the effort itself. The invasion was a romantic rejection of the bureaucratic mentality of Pentagon and CIA civil servants, of the perceived passivity of most American citizens, and of the creaking political machinery of Washington. What's not wrong with the war on Iraq is that it was too utopian, so much as that it was an irrational act of will with no higher purpose than its own expression.