Thursday, February 10, 2005
Get With the Program
Mark Steyn, writing for his British readers in the Spectator, observes that the Tory party, Britain's ostensible conservatives, lacks spine and vision - and risks ending up with nothing to conserve. Unlike their counterparts in America, the British conservatives are exhibiting all the worst traits of the two wings of our Democratic party.
As a result, the Tory party looks a lot more like the Democratic party and the Australian Labor party than its nominal ideological soulmates. For one thing, they’re losers. Last year, after the Spanish election, after the failure to find WMD, after new commissions and reports every other week, and the sense from the press that the ‘BUSH LIED!!/ BLAIR LIED!!!!’ stuff could be made to stick, they fell for the received wisdom that Iraq would prove an electoral liability for the three musketeers of the Anglosphere. Instead, John Howard won big, and so did Bush, and so will Blair. Meanwhile, Iraq is more of a liability for their oppositions: the Democrats are split between a noisy anti-war faction (Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy) and a bunch of pusillanimous, jelly-spined, finger-in-the-windy weathervane pols who don’t know whether they’re for it or against it until their consultants run it by the focus groups (Kerry, Edwards, 2008 contender Evan Bayh).
Lord Hurd (a Tory MP) evidently thinks ‘nation-building’ is utopian hooey. Maybe it is. But one reason the region is in the mess it’s in is that, in 1922, fag-end British imperialism was too fainthearted to inculcate British ‘nation-building’ values (as in India) but still arrogant enough to complicate their politics, impose weak outside emirs as their kings, elevate minority groups into the ruling class — and then scram. It’s no coincidence that the region of the world that causes the most trouble for the rest is the one the Western imperialists stayed in just long enough to screw up but not long enough to do any good in.
Right now, Bush is the only strategic game in town. He intends to change, by one means or another, the problem regimes in the Middle East — which is almost all of them — and shrivel their ideological exports. It’s an ambitious strategy, but so far it’s working out, and at a level of casualties that any previous generation, in Britain or America, would have recognised as the lowest in history. Maybe the Tory nay-sayers have a better idea, but, if not, elegant, languid, limp toff complacency isn’t going to cut it. British Conservatives should get on side, before there’s nothing left to conserve.
# posted by mds : 10:43 AM
