A good piece by Cato Institute scholars Justin Logan and Chritopher Preble criticizing a recent Jonah Goldberg commendation of nation building as the way to win the war on terrorism at National Review Online of all places. Kudos to them for publishing a piece that basically contradicts their editorial line on the war.

We even get a paragraph of defeatist liberal blame-America first-ism:

Much as it hurts to say it, our enemies by and large don’t hate us because they’re poor, or because they’re hopeless; they hate us because they believe that we are hostile to them. As a recent report from the Government Accountability Office put things, “U.S. foreign policy is the major root cause behind anti-American sentiments among Muslim populations and…this point needs to be better researched, absorbed, and acted upon by government officials.” Mucking about in Chad isn’t going to help our position in the war on terror, and could well serve to make it worse by strengthening Muslims’ beliefs about American foreign policy.

And this is a point that always bears repeating:

Conservative skepticism about government action should not be limited to domestic policy. If the American government is smart enough to figure out how to make a coherent state out of Chad, what is it not smart enough to do?

Many conservatives seem to have abandoned, or at least sharply curtailed, their skepticism about government not only when it comes to things like nation-building, but in trusting the government (and the executive branch in particular) to wield largely unaccountable power in the areas of war, detention and interrogation practices, surveillance, etc. The traditional conservative and classical liberal objection to this was always that fallible human beings are neither wise enough nor good enough to be trusted with this kind of power. And that this skepticism should prevail even when your own party is in power.