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The untethered mind of a modern conservative
Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review, seems to be unguided by consistency of thought when it comes to Iraq and the “war on terror.” This is unsurprising in one who has written that it doesn’t matter what name we use for our enemy in this war, because, as he’s put it, “everyone knows what we’re talking about”—an amazing statement when we consider the radically different meanings of, and the radically different practical consequences resulting from, calling our enemy “terror,” or “Islamic fascism,” or “Islam,” among other alternative designations. How can we expect consistency of thought, or indeed any thought at all, from a person who dismisses the very basis of thought, namely the effort to find words that most accurately convey reality? The question arises whether Lowry’s intellectual attitude is all that different from that of Rep. Sylvester Reyes, the chairman-designate of the House Intelligence Committee who has said that he doesn’t need to know whether Al Qaeda is Sunni or Shi’ite. As for Lowry’s twists and turns on Iraq, after talking up our prospects for success in Iraq for a couple of years, he has in recent months, like many of his fellow establishment conservatives, turned critical of the Bush policy, and not just over the manner in which it was executed. This past August 8 he questioned the entire ideological basis of the policy when he wrote that Muslims desire other things—namely the destruction of Israel—more than they desire freedom. Yet at The Corner on December 8 Lowry turned around yet again, approvingly quoting the tendentious and highly implausible argument of Elliot Cohen (one of the “Magnificent Seven” neocons interviewed by Vanity Fair) that the only problem with our actions in Iraq has been our military leaders’ lack of competence. Our officers knew everything they needed to know to make things work in Iraq, Cohen writes, they just didn’t do it, or they didn’t do it right. Echoing Cohen’s point, Lowry entitles the blog entry “EXECUTION IS THE THING.” So, according to Lowry in his latest incarnation, our problem in Iraq has been the poor execution of a good policy, not, as he wrote four months ago, a wrongly conceived policy based on a totally false view of the Muslim mind—a false view generated, moreover, by neoconservative ideology. Thus Lowry, the conservative editor who rejects the importance of words, meanders from one notion to another, his mind a shapeless vessel, its contents determined largely by whatever his equally unserious colleagues in the mainstream “conservative” commentariat happen to be saying today, or this week, or this month.
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