Without a sense of honor, however defined, there is no incentive to behave

Baby Cakes kept Tuck on his toes yesterday during sewing lessons preparatory to making new curtains for the living room and seat covers for the dining-room chairs, the very definition of "shambles."

In the post-Fukuyama entrail reading of the "failure" of the nation's -- Bushitler's -- nuanced plan to prevail in the War on Terror, we were desperately seeking confirmation of our faith that GW has the nation on the "right track." William F. Buckley was no help at all, as Uncle Jimbo of Blackfive explained this morning:

I hesitated and actually quivered a bit as I contemplated writing this, but honesty means taking on your icons too. William F. Buckley Jr. is one of the most brilliant and entertaining thinkers in American history. When he recently wrote a column saying we need to admit defeat in Iraq, I was disheartened. He has opposed the endeavor from the start, but now he moves in a direction not reflective of the actual situation. I realize that I step way above my station to say that we should not take his view, but I don't rise to gainsay WFB. I rise to gainsay those who have held powerful views during their lives and fought the good fight, but counsel against action in their advancing years.

Back to that other doubting icon, the young and still wet-behind-the-ears Fukuyama of the much-blogged NYT article already behind a gated pay-to-play community. Too cluelessly self-defeating on the part of the NYT's powers that be, but you can still get a good chunk of his argument at History News Network:

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem.

We'd say it depends upon what your definition of "shambles" is, and Michael Barone puts Fukuyama's take in perspective:

[The National Security Strategy] was, as Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has written, "the most fundamental reassessment of American grand strategy in over half a century," since Harry Truman set America on its course in the Cold War . . .

My prediction: Bush's successors, for all their criticisms (John McCain wants a larger military; Hillary Rodham Clinton says that she wouldn't have voted for military action in Iraq knowing what she knows now), will find it hard to move outside the framework of the National Security Strategy, as they take on Bush's burden of fighting what we're starting to call the Long War.

We were totally encouraged -- reinforced in our world view? -- by the words of Confederate Yankee:

The attack on the al-Askariya shrine was probably al Qaeda's last best hope of triggering a sectarian civil war in Iraq. Instead of ripping the nation apart however, it seems to have had the opposite effect, driving the leaders of Iraq's various ethnic groups closer together in a conflict against a common enemy.

Yes. That's what we WANTED to hear. Back to Fukuyama, he got the point without seeming to understand what he was saying:

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations(for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare).

That's where we've been since day one. Not sure about the neo-cons or even GW himself. Being a Darwinian, we have always gone with our understanding of nature and human nature. Welfare could never work as it denies the importance of being noticed within one's reproductive group. Without a sense of honor, however defined, there is no incentive to behave. But removing Saddam and leaving the slate relatively clean for self-interested Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and other Iraqi citizens to battle it out with words instead of weapons seems like a pretty good idea.

Comments

[Tara]

Buckley leans toward that brand of foreign policy known as "realism" as does Brent Scowcroft who counseled Bush 41.

Basically, Buckley believes in the "democracy for me but not for thee" school of shortsightedness, which is why we found ourselves on September 11, 2001 looking upward toward the sky in New York City in horror.

Call it Pat Buchananism. Call it isolationism. I call it lethal.