Tamanaha: "Conservatives Don't Get It"

Brian Tamanaha has this very interesting post over at Professor Jack Balkin's blog.  He notes that some "prominent conservatives" have been rethinking publicly their previous support for the war in Iraq, but insists that these conservatives continue to miss the point.  For example, he writes, Andrew Sullivan has confessed to "three huge errors.  The first was to overestimate the competence of government, especially in very tricky areas like WMD intelligence....  The second error was narcissism. America's power blinded many of us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes. . . .  The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There is a large discrepancy between neoconservatism's skepticism of government's ability to change culture at home and its naivete when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad."

But, Tamanaha insists:

The first and overarching error of neoconservatives, Mr. Sullivan, is their willingness (nay, eagerness) to use war to achieve their ideological objectives. Neoconservatives see war as a tool, perhaps messy and unpleasant, not to mention expensive, but sometimes useful.

War is the greatest horror we inflict upon one another, destroying bodies and lives, inflicting untold pain, often on innocent bystanders. War must be a last resort, undertaken with great reluctance, when no other option is available--appropriate only when necessary to defend ourselves against an immediate aggressor (as international law recognizes).

That was not the case with Iraq. Bush and the neoconservatives were bent on starting a war in Iraq for their own ideological and personal reasons and they made sure it came about. Bush's premptive war doctrine, recently reiterated, is more of the same failure to recogize the utimate horror of war.

None of the neoconservative mea culpas I have read have recognized this true (moral and pragmatic) error of their vision and understanding, which is more fundamental than Sullivan's three so-called "huge errors." If neoconservatives understood that war is appropriate only as an absolutely last resort to defend ourselves against an attack, the war would never have happened--hence no WMD debacle (because there was not enough to justify war), no offending allies with our arrogance of power, and no attempt to shape another country in our own image.

I suspect -- but maybe I am wrong -- that Tamanaha and I would disagree about what it means, operationally, to commmit to the constraint that "[w]ar must be a last resort, undertaken with great reluctance, when no other option is available--appropriate only when necessary to defend ourselves against an immediate aggressor (as international law recognizes)."  And, I am not convinced that, in principle, ousting a dangerous and murderous regime can never provide a justifiable purpose for waging war (though any such war must, of course, be conducted in a moral way).  That said, the post is worth reading in full.