David Brooks: A More Humble Hawk

This blog is in a series of posts from my readings of THE RIGHT WAR? THE CONSERVATIVE DEBATE ON IRAQ. Please contribute your comments. The following is a discussion of Chapter 7, a republished article by the David Brooks, April 17, 2004, New York Times.


The trend of the neo-cons backing down just a bit continues here with David Brooks' column on April 17, 2004. Brooks admits he was too optimistic about Iraq in the run-up to the war. “I never thought it would be this bad … I didn’t expect that a year after liberation, hostile militias would be taking over cities or that it would be unsafe to walk around Baghdad.”

“I did not appreciate how our very presence in Iraq would overshadow democratization.” In April 2004 he begins to understand how it must feel to be occupied. He says that he now understands that “while the Iraqis don’t want us to fail, since our failure would mean their failure, many don’t want to see us succeed either. They want us to bleed, to get taken down a notch, to suffer for their chaos and suffering. A democratic Iraq is an abstraction they want for the future; the humiliation of America is a pleasure they can savor today.”

He also voices some criticisms of how the the Bush administration approached the war and the ability to restore order in the post-war period. He says that the administration did not pour the “men and materiel” into Iraq that he and his colleagues at The Weekly Standard had argued for if a war in Iraq was to be pursued. “The failure to establish order was the prime mistake, from which all other problems flow.”

Yet, he is still a believer. “Despite all this – and maybe it’s pure defensiveness – I still believe that in 20 years, no one will doubt that Bush did the right thing.” He thus concludes that, “We hawks were wrong about many things. But in opening up the possibility for a slow trudge towards democracy, we were still right about the big thing.”

So, this is mostly a modest gripe, a modest change of heart, but as of April 2004, he still feels that he and his fellow hawks got the big picture right. His argument could be summed up as this: Iraq was the right war, it has just not gone as planned, mostly due to a lack of proper preparation. And, the experience has shown him that a U.S. presence in Iraq is perhaps as much of a roadblock as it is a necessity in bringing democracy to a people used to tyranny.