Conservatism failed? Do it again with twice the effort. (Failure assured.)

Booman has provided an excellent summary of the efforts and results of the Bush - Neoconservative approach to the Middle East.

First the administration did everything they could to undermine Barak and help Sharon get elected. Then they stood by and clapped as Sharon dismantled the Palestinian Authority. Then they pushed for Palestinian elections, publicly backed Fatah, and watched Hamas sweep to victory. Then they gave a green light to a disastrous invasion of Lebanon. And this led to a total victory of Hamas in Gaza.

Now the Palestinians are divided, Israel is weak, and the prospects of a peace process lie in ashes. How can this administration 'refurbish' a peace process that lies in cinders? Is this 'realism'?

We have 'liberated' the Arab Shi'ites of Iraq and backed a Shi'a dominated government there for the last four years. Our new strategy is to make a 'political-military alliance with the dominant Sunni Arab powers -- especially Saudi Arabia'?

This is what the Bush - Cheney administration has done so far. Their ideologically-based and reality-free efforts have all failed and mostly made things worse than they were before.

This is an administration which emotionally mirrors its leaders. They do not self-analyze or accept the criticism of others. They know that what they are doing and have done is correct, so failure has to be the result of sabotage by liberals, spies or other enemies while criticism of what they know to be "right" is just another tool their enemies use to prevent them from acting.

They know they are "right" in what they do, so they attribute what they do to "Conservatism." In case one of their own, like Bush, is clearly established to have screwed up things badly, they can reject him by claiming that he failed to remain a conservative. The proof is that things got screwed up, and since conservatism is perfect and cannot fail the reason things got screwed up is that Bush (or whoever the failure of the day is) failed to remain a conservative.

The result is that they do not learn from their failures. They can't. They never acknowledge failure.

So when their efforts fail, the response is to return to "conservative principles" and redouble the effort. Somehow doing the same thing over again but twice as big and with twice the effort is going to succeed when it failed previously.

This is an innate human characteristic of ideologically-based organizations in which individuals are promoted to senior power positions based on their ideology rather than their demonstrated competence on the job. The Communists running the Soviet Union continually failed in economic, political and social efforts for exactly the same reason. Each time the application of Communist ideology failed to solve some pressing problem, they searched for a scapegoat, blamed him for failure to apply true Communist ideology, and instead of working to find the source of the problem they again attempted to apply Communist ideology, but which greater effort. The result was that they ran their society into the ground.

The very idea that conservatives label "Liberalism" means to reject failed ideologies, identify failures when an outcome is not good, then find real solutions and try again with different procedures. There is no "Liberal-based movement" and never will be. "Liberals" (as conservatives label them) are actually just people who are willing to identify problems and try to solve them on their own basis rather, identify failures and attempt to reword the solution when the failed parts are identified. This requires that failures be recognized and responsibility for those failures be ascertained.

This realism-based approach differs sharply from the continual attempts to apply some on-size-fits-all ideology. It starts with recognizing failure and ascertaining responsibility for that failure. The Cheney - Bush - NeoCon adventure in Iraq is such a failure, and the responsibility for that failure lies squarely on George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the conservative-dominated Republican Party.

Until and unless the conservatives recognize and publicly acknowledge their own responsibility (and that of the Imperialist and militarist conservative ideology) for the failure of the Iraq adventure they cannot be accepted as part of the solution.

More from Booman:

The real 'realism' is that we have utterly failed in our Mideast policies, and we better start facing up to the consequences. Permawar is not the answer. We don't have the money.

We need to start planning for a future where we do not dominate the Middle East. This will involve significant economic risks...especially for the availability of cheap and readily available energy. It also suggests that Israel should start getting serious about a permanent, sustainable accommodation with the Palestinians and their neighbors. Keeping a few of their most ardent and unquestioning supporters, like Joe Lieberman, in the U.S. Senate is not going to be enough to sustain an acceptable level of security. We cannot continue to take on the blowback risks and international hit to our moral standing that our support for Israel currently entails.

That's 'realism'.