Bush the Perfectionist Heretic?

President Bush has stirred up irritation-to-outrage among some conservative bloggers of Christian intellectual peruasion, with his comments in last Friday's news conference: for example (from Rich Lowry's summary), "I strongly believe that Muslims desire to be free just like Methodists desire to be free," and "America must never lose faith in the capacity of forms of government to transform regions."  Everyone agrees that God desires freedom for all human beings, including political freedom; it's Bush's move from that to the inevitability of realizing these aspirations that provoked the reactions.  Ross Douthat: "[T]he attempt to transform God's promise of freedom through Jesus Christ into a this-world promise of universal democracy is the worst kind of 'immanentizing the eschaton' utopian bullshit," and (Douthat thinks at least sometimes), "not one more American soldier should die for the President's world-historical delusions."  And Rich Lowry:

Perhaps Methodists and Muslims do equally desire freedom, but Methodism, as a movement that grew out of and thrived in 18th century Anglo-America, would seem to me to be more naturally compatible with an individualistic, liberal democratic order. Culture matters, and that's something Bush is very reluctant to acknowledge. You can believe freedom is a gift from the Almighty and still recognize that some cultural soil is more or less compatible with supporting political systems that protect liberty. . . .  In my view, people don't desire freedom first and foremost, but order, and after that probably comes pride.

What are Michael Novak, Richard Neuhaus, and the familiar "culture comes before politics" religious conservatives when the President talks about the "capacity of forms of government to transform regions"?

I vacillate between thinking that the great failures in Iraq are attributable to Bush-style naive universal moralism, and thinking that they're attributable to Cheney-style national-interest cynicism.  Probably it's been a toxic mixture of both.  From different starting points, they overlapped in suggesting that the U.S. didn't have to worry too much about the fallout of invasion: Bush because God would ensure everything would turn out all right if we showed patience, and Cheney because, well, who cares about the consequences, long-term or to others, if we can enforce our will to make ourselves safer in the immediate term.

Of course diagnosis of the wrongheaded past is not the same as prescription for the way forward, let alone a solution for what to do about Iraq now.  But at least two books in the last year -- Ethical Realism by Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, and The Good Fight by Peter Beinart -- give ideas for an approach that combines the moral goals with a sense of realism about both the extent to they which can be achieved and the routes for doing so.

Tom