(This post had its origins in some comments at the Crunchy Con blog.)

John Derbyshire, National Review‘s paleo-leaning curmudgeon and resident pessimist, has penned a mea culpa of sorts for his support of the war in Iraq. The problem, he thinks, is that the Bush administration has turned what should have been an exercise in punitive imperial power into a utopian attempt at nation-building. He doesn’t care about bringing the blessings of democracy to Iraq, he just thinks that anyone who messes with the USA should be “smacked down with great ferocity.” After 9/11 the US, in addition to pursuing al-Qaeda, needed to make an example of someone in the Muslim world to show that we won’t be trifled with, and Saddam’s Iraq, with its history of defying the will of the international community, seemed like a promising candidate. Unfortunately, this endeavor was hijacked by the dreamy-eyed Wilsonian idealists in the Bush administration and instead of a ferocious smack-down of the regime followed by a quick exit, America is bogged down by the ongoing occupation in a futile attempt to install a Jeffersonian democracy on the banks of the Tigris.

Admittedly there’s something refreshing about the steely-eyed realism of Derbyshire’s argument; it’s the kind of thing you expect from hard-nosed, no-nonsense conservatives. No talk here of spreading freedom or making the world safe for democracy. In fact, one of the things that puzzled me about conservative support for the Iraq war was that it seemed to fly in the face of some of the key conservative insights like the law of unintended consequences and the ineffectiveness of top-down social engineering through government force.

But Derbyshire’s indifference to the fate of foreigners seems to be a manifestation of what Ross Douthat at The American Scene called his “tribalism” – the belief the moral consideration extends to one’s own and not to outsiders. There’s definitely a certain kind of American nationalism that has its roots in this kind of blood and soil sentiment. And in and of itself, devotion to one’s kith and kin can be a virtue. But it becomes vicious when it’s used as an excuse to visit injustice on strangers, those who don’t fall within one’s own circle. Both Christianity and liberal humanism are universalist in their moral aspirations; the mere fact that someone is a foreigner is not a sufficient reason for treating them as less than human. To launch a war in Iraq as an attempt to bring liberal democracy to the Middle East may be folly, but to launch a war killing thousands of innocent people just to make people fear us is something worse.

Reasonable people disagree about whether the ongoing occupation of Iraq is a good idea, but by launching this war we’ve surely incurred some kind of obligation toward the people of Iraq, whether it be to help them build a stable and relatively humane government or to get out of their way. And in no case are we justified in treating them as less than human.