I hope you're reading Juan Cole regularly. Unlike many of those in the Bush administration who can offer only the pose without substance (and many administration defenders in the press, and on blogs), Cole is an actual Middle East expert, with extraordinary knowledge of the region, its various cultures, and its history. Even if you disagree with all of Cole's personal political beliefs (which I think it is safe to say are well left of center), his writings are invaluable for an understanding of what is now transpiring in that part of the world. This entry from today is a very good example of what I mean. Toward the conclusion of that post, in talking about Bush's characterization of the Iraq war as a" catastrophic success," Cole writes:

This is the line that the US military succeeded so well so fast against Saddam's army that chaos naturally ensued.

Democrats are having a lot of fun with the phrase, but the real problem is that that analysis of what went wrong is incorrect. The Bush administration simply mismanaged Iraq. It dissolved the Iraqi army, throwing the country into chaos. That army was not gone and would have gladly showed up at the barracks for a paycheck. It pursued a highly punitive policy of firing and excluding members of the Baath Party, which was not done in so thorough-going a manner even to Nazis in post-war Germany. It canceled planned municipal elections, denying people any stake in their new"government," which was more or less appointed by the US. It put all its efforts into destroying Arab socialism in Iraq and creating a sudden free market, rather than paying attention to the preconditions for entrepreneurial activity, like security and services. It kept changing its policies-- early on it was going to turn the country over to Ahmad Chalabi in 6 months. Then that plan was scotched and Paul Bremer was brought in to play MacArthur in Tokyo for a projected two or three years. Then that didn't work and there would be council-based elections. Then those wouldn't work and there would be a"transfer of sovereignty." All this is not to mention the brutal and punitive sieges of Fallujah and Najaf and the Abu Ghuraib torture scandal, etc., etc.

So it wasn't a catastrophic success that caused the problem. It was that Iraq was being run at the upper levels by a handful of screw-ups who had all sorts of ulterior motives, and at least sometimes did not have the best interests of the country at heart. And Bush is the one who put them in charge.

The speech-makers [at the Republican Convention last night] kept saying"we did not seek this war," and that it was imposed on us, and by God we were going to keep hitting back. That is, the rhetoric was that of righteous anger, of the avenging victim. While this argument works with regard to Afghanistan (which the US did not invade, only providing air cover to an indigenous group. the Northern Alliance), it is hollow with regard to Iraq. Only by confusing the"war on terror" with the war on Iraq could this rhetoric be even somewhat meaningful, and it is not a valid conflation.

No American president has more desperately sought out a war with any country than George W. Bush sought out this war with Iraq. Only Polk's war on Mexico, also based on false pretexts, even comes close to the degree of crafty manipulation employed by Bush and Cheney to get up the Iraq war. Intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was deliberately and vastly exaggerated, producing a"nuclear threat" where there wasn't even so much as a single gamma ray to be registered. Innuendo and repetition were cleverly used to tie Saddam to Usama Bin Laden operationally, a link that all serious intelligence professionals deny.

So, I agree that the war in Afghanistan was imposed on the US. But the war on Iraq was not. And pretending that the US had no choice but to attack Iraq and reduce it to a pitiful failed state is flatly dishonest. ...

I also objected to the use of 9/11 and the US military for partisan purposes. 9/11 happened to all of us, Republican and Democrat. Is it really plausible that all those firefighters from Queens are Republicans? But that was the impression they tried to give. As for singing all the service songs, not all servicemen support Bush. One person with direct knowledge of the incident told me that a US officer in Iraq had had to threaten his tired, dusty, frightened men with being disciplined if they did not stop referring to Bush as"the Deserter."

I am frankly not impressed by the Bush administration response to al-Qaeda. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are at large, as are a large number of other high al-Qaeda operatives. The Bush administration missed a chance to get a number of important al-Qaeda figures from Iran, which wanted some Mojahedin-e Khalq terrorists in return, because the Neocons in the Pentagon have some sort of weird alliance with the MEK mad bombers. Most of the really big al-Qaeda fish have been caught by Pakistan, to which the Bush administration has just farmed out some of the most important counter-insurgency work against al-Qaeda. Is this wise?

Reason's Nick Gillespie and I held the libertarian banner, NRO's Jonah Goldberg and two others spoke for the conservatives, and The New Republic's, Peter Beinhart took issue for the left, along with one other woman who works in the Georgia Statehosue whose name escapes me, and a guy running for the Illinois Statehouse from the Green Party.

The afternoon's drama came toward the end of the panel, with this skinny kid sitting in the front row, who happened to be donning a bright red t-shirt with the Soviet hammer and sickle. I wanted to call him out from the start. I just felt a little crass about it. But as the panel wore on, it continued to gnaw at me. It dawned on me that I or the lefists on the panel would have had no problem calling the kid out if he'd been wearing a t-shirt with neo-Nazi regalia. And he applauded vigorously when the lefties spoke, and sat on his hands when the rest of us spoke, meaning of course that he wasn't wearing the shirt with any sense of irony.

So when he finally raised his hand during the Q&A;, I decided that --what the hell -- I might as well point out how silly he looks advertising a belief system rooted in slavery and murder. He asked an unrelated question, which I think the Green Party guy answered. I then chime din, recommending to the kid that he read Anne Applebaum's Gulag, the Pulitzer winning book which documents the horrors of the Soviet work camps. He didn't seem to get it.

So I added,"I know Soviet chic is hip right now, particularly on college campuses. But you really ought to think about the message you send by wearing that shirt. It has all the charm of a swastika."

With that, Hillsdale poly sci Professor David Bobb added,"you're associating yourself with the deaths of 100 million people..."

The kid then interrupted Bobb, with obvious agitation,"Yes, I know all about the history of the Soviet Union."

To which Bobb replied,"Oh, so you know that you're being insulting."

Boos and jeers flited up from the crowd. By the time we had dinner, the kid had thrown a sweater over the t-shirt.

Maybe it was boorish to call the kid out. But there's something really aggravating about these middle class kids born into the most privileged conditions in all of human history suddenly finding it trendy to carry water for a belief system that murdered hundreds of millions of people, and enslaved billions more.

Me, I just wanna' smack 'em a few times.

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, in today's NY Times Magazine, David Brooks gives us a lesson on"How to Reinvent the G.O.P.." In short: The Grand Old Party should simply become the Grand Much Older Party, and embrace the genuinely interventionist roots of Republicanism.

Brooks thinks President George W. Bush is well on his way to this romantic embrace; after all, the current President is the"guy who would create a huge new cabinet department for homeland security, who would not try to cut even a single government agency, who would be the first president in a generation to create a new entitlement program, the prescription drug benefit, projected to cost $534 billion over the next 10 years." Bush is the guy who"would spend federal dollars with an alacrity that Clinton never dreamed of, would create large deficits, would significantly increase the federal role in education, would increase farm subsidies, would pass campaign-finance reform and would temporarily impose tariffs on steel."

Brooks thinks this is"the death of small-government conservatism," buying into the cliche that Republicans have finally turned away from their"old anti-statist governing philosophy." But for all the small-government rhetoric of the Reagan years, the GOP has never been a"small-government" party. And deep down, Brooks knows this.

Drawing inspiration from David Frum, Brooks argues that it was"the death of socialism" that"transformed the Republican Party just as much as it has transformed the parties of the left." In their former attempts to curtail the growth of"Big Government," the GOP resurrected Jeffersonian rhetorical themes of decentralization."Conservatives and libertarians defeated socialism," Brooks asserts,"intellectually and then practically." But"[j]ust as socialism will no longer be the guiding goal for the left, reducing the size of government cannot be the governing philosophy for the next generation of conservatives, as the Republican Party is only now beginning to understand."

And it is Bush who has helped the current GOP generation"to come up with a governing philosophy that applies to the times," one that rejects the"obsolete" and"simple government-is-the-problem philosophy of the older Republicans." Bush's" compassionate conservative" agenda advocated"effective and energetic government." But it is only in war that Bush has begun to solidify the"progressive conservative tradition," rooted in the neomercantilist politics of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. This is the politics that forged government-sponsored"internal improvements" (today, we'd call it"building infrastructure"), the government socialization of risk, government subsidies for business, government land grants for railroads, and national bank cartelization and centralization. Brooks thinks these policies facilitated trade by"open[ing] fields of enterprise," but, in reality, they have only eventuated in the 21st century"spending binge" and feeding frenzy of privilege-seeking that even Brooks sees as"a cancer on modern conservatism":

The money is appropriated in increments large and small -- a $180 billion corporate tax bill one week, a steady stream of pork projects all the rest. In 1994, there were 4,126 ''earmarks'' -- special spending provisions -- attached to the 13 annual appropriations bills. In 2004, there were around 14,000. Real federal spending on the Departments of Education, Commerce and Health and Human Services has roughly doubled since the Republicans took control of the House in 1994. This is a governing majority without shape, coherence or discipline.

Reinventing the GOP doesn't mean an end to this privilege-dispensing; it just means providing that dispensation with more"discipline." Yes, Brooks realizes,"any solution begins with culture." But genuinely"progressive conservatives understand that while culture matters most, government can alter culture." That's why we should applaud those"[g]overnment agencies [that] are now trying to design programs to encourage and strengthen marriage." That's why we should embrace"wage subsidies" and greater federal control of education to wrestle the system from"local monopolies," like unions. That's why we can use"the strong-government tradition" to improve market" competition." And finally, that's why we need"National service," to"encourage people ... to serve a cause larger than self-interest, fuse their own efforts with those from other regions and other walks of life and cultivate a spirit of citizenship."

And it doesn't end there. Brooks advocates the full internationalization of this"progressive conservative tradition" by embracing a comprehensive global nation-building enterprise."We need to strengthen nation-states," he writes."We are going to have to construct a multilateral nation-building apparatus so that each time a nation-building moment comes along, we don't have to patch one together ad hoc."

Somehow, Brooks thinks that this"progressive conservatism" will"rebuild the bonds among free-market conservatives, who dream of liberty; social conservatives, who dream of decency; middle-class suburbanites, who dream of opportunity; and foreign-policy hawks, who dream of security and democracy."

Keep dreaming, Mr. Brooks. The Bush administration's movement toward"progressive conservatism" or neoconservatism or theocratic fundamentalism or any other neologism we can coin has resulted in a near-irreparable conservative crack-up, which has fractured the uneasy consensus that once existed among these groups.

Nevertheless, I do believe that Brooks'"progressive conservatism" is more honest than the alleged"small-government conservatism" that dominated the GOP some 20 years ago. At least this time, the pretense of small-government ideology has been replaced by an ideology much more in keeping with the welfare-warfare statist reality that both Democrats and Republicans have sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. It's why there will be no fundamental difference whether Bush wins or Kerry wins.

It's also why I can agree with Brooks from a profoundly libertarian perspective:"It's time for one party or another to invent ... some new governing philosophy that will ... transform the partisan divide." How about one that is consistent in its understanding and application of the freedom-loving principles upon which this country was founded?

I wanted to believe that here was finally a man who was serious about ideas. His flip flops on whether it was ethical for out-staters to run for the Senate (after denouncing Hillary for this sin) bothered me a bit as did his endorsement of reparations.....but I was still inclined to regard it as a matter of a glass half full. At least, I thought, Keyes would never play the seedy, and oh so predictable, game of pork barrel politics. Ah....ye of too much faith.

In a case of pandering to the farm lobby that would have done my fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey proud, Keyes has risen to the defense of the Department of Agriculture. In 1996, he had called for abolition of that agency.

When a reporter pointed this out, Keyes denied that he had ever favored abolition. Finally, he admitted that he once had taken that position but explained that things were different now. Three years of"efficient" Republican rule of that agency have convinced him that it is providing a wonderful service.