Ought implies can

Though I was opposed to the Iraq war from the get-go, I’ve been ambivalent, like many people, about what the U.S. should do now that it’s there. After all, whatever the wisdom of going in, Saddam’s regime was truly evil, and I had harbored the hope that it might be possible to help create a decent government there that would at least be more respectful of basic human rights.

Lately though I’ve started to wonder if the insistence on the part of the political and pundit class that, no matter what, we must not “cut and run” isn’t motivated less by an objective assessment of what would happen in Iraq if we left rather than stayed, and more by a fear that leaving would undermine U.S. “credibility.” If there’s one view that is held in common by the mainstream Left and Right, the Thomas Friedmans and the Charles Krauthammers, it’s that the U.S. has the power and the ability to intervene successfully in other countries. But to pull out would be to acknowledge the limitations on our ability to “nation build” and generally shape the world in accordance with our ideals. And that would call into question a central pillar of the worldview of much of the ruling and chattering classes.

In that vein, Sojourners reviews David Rieff’s At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. (I picked up Rieff’s book after reading the review, but haven’t started it yet.) Rieff appears to be a chastened liberal hawk of sorts; he was an advocate of various “humanitarian interventions” but first hand encounters with the results have left him a great deal more skeptical.

No one wants to abandon the Iraqi people to chaos and civil war, but what if, as conservative Andrew Bacevich recently argued, we’ve already done all we can?