Conservative reasons for the Iraq war.

THE BRITISH political philosopher Michael Oakeshott famously summed up conservatism thus:

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to Utopian bliss.

It is easy, therefore, to understand the conservative argument in the USA and UK against the Iraq war. Going to war in Iraq is complicated to say the least. Indeed, George W. Bush's foreign policy often seems to owe more to Democrat internationalism than Republican realism. Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser to Bush, embodies the conservative anti-war position. In a recent interview with the New Yorker's Geoffrey Goldberg, he recalled,

 
   [US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] ... says 
   we're going to democratise Iraq, and I said, "Condi, 
   you're not going to democratise Iraq," and she said, 
   "You know, you're just stuck in the old days," and 
   she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an 
   autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and 
   so forth ... But we've had fifty years of peace. 

In December's Quadrant Tom Switzer and Neil Clark lamented the lack of Australian conservative antiwar argument, especially compared to the USA and UK. They complained that Australian conservatives "have practically wanted the Australian Army to serve as the American Foreign Legion". True conservatives, they argued, should oppose the war in Iraq. "Conservatives," they claimed, "are more realist that idealist, prudent than ideological, and have an ingrained scepticism about foreign adventures that do not directly affect the national interest."

The war, according to Switzer and Clark, is profoundly un-conservative, and any threat that Saddam posed could have been dealt with as it had been since 1991. They raise some interesting points, not least the corollary that conservatives in Australia aren't given to argument or reflection. However, their argument is undermined by flaws in the conservative anti-war position.

Anti-war conservatives, in advocating the wisdom of their position, might point to the 30,000 dead (not the 100,000 Switzer and Clark erroneously cite). This position is not without merit; however, the anti-war conservative must answer two questions. First, was the continuation of the policy of containment and sanctions viable? And second, what would have happened had there been no invasion?